I finally tried out the latest ltspice on mac. I kept using IV until now, and I wanted to give it a whirl. But I just ran into a problem and it's making me rethink using it at all.
With IV, knowing how incomplete it is, I always used an external text editor (BBE) to manually edit the asc files to get done what couldn't be done within IV, and although on some occasion, for unknown reasons, it croaked when opening an asc file complaining about the encoding, but I used BBE's function to reopen the file with a specific encoding, and that has been helping, without losing anything, so far.
However, now with XVII, I just tried editing an asc with BBE, which of course, complained about encoding when opening the file, then I did the same as before with IV and reopened, but it was displaying badly, with red question marks every other characters. Crappy, no matter which encoding I tried. The main problem is that when I saved the file with BBE, I didn't get back my simulation in XVII, it only shows mostly the wires, and hardly anything else now, not even the comments or sim stuff, basically nothing useful.
I spent all that time drawing up all the stuff for a sim, and now one save from BBE and it's all trashed. What gives? Anyone knows how to salvage this? If I reopen in BBE, it looks the same as it did the first time, so the stuff is basically still there, just not in a way intelligible for XVII. Trying to open that XVII sim in IV doesn't work either, IV croaks about it and can't do anything.
What changed in XVII?? I know they had to have changed the encoding, but to what exactly? I've been digging, googling stuff, with no fix for this, and only found out that the raw files are supposed to be encoded UTF16 (UTF16LE?), but found nothing about the asc file encoding, and what can be done when they were saved from an other program with the wrong encoding. Need help to recover that last sim...
With IV, knowing how incomplete it is, I always used an external text editor (BBE) to manually edit the asc files to get done what couldn't be done within IV, and although on some occasion, for unknown reasons, it croaked when opening an asc file complaining about the encoding, but I used BBE's function to reopen the file with a specific encoding, and that has been helping, without losing anything, so far.
However, now with XVII, I just tried editing an asc with BBE, which of course, complained about encoding when opening the file, then I did the same as before with IV and reopened, but it was displaying badly, with red question marks every other characters. Crappy, no matter which encoding I tried. The main problem is that when I saved the file with BBE, I didn't get back my simulation in XVII, it only shows mostly the wires, and hardly anything else now, not even the comments or sim stuff, basically nothing useful.
I spent all that time drawing up all the stuff for a sim, and now one save from BBE and it's all trashed. What gives? Anyone knows how to salvage this? If I reopen in BBE, it looks the same as it did the first time, so the stuff is basically still there, just not in a way intelligible for XVII. Trying to open that XVII sim in IV doesn't work either, IV croaks about it and can't do anything.
What changed in XVII?? I know they had to have changed the encoding, but to what exactly? I've been digging, googling stuff, with no fix for this, and only found out that the raw files are supposed to be encoded UTF16 (UTF16LE?), but found nothing about the asc file encoding, and what can be done when they were saved from an other program with the wrong encoding. Need help to recover that last sim...
First of all why are you complicate your life using and external editor? When I start use Ltspice because all my computer are Apple I of course opted for the Mac version, but immediately realise was more complicated and for unknown reason didn't work out for me so swap to the Windows version, with parallels desktop I am running Windows7 on my iMac and all work like a charm, also I use both version LTSpice IV and also the XVII without problem, is just matter to get use to it, in my experience I design with LTSpice different tube amp, Riaa pre-amp, tone stack control, and the simulation is normally very close to the real measurement and test, average 5/10% of difference, in one case for a tone-stack control simulation and reality was exactly the same, so having all this results give me the confidence to keep using LTSpice, so just don't give up until you will find how make it work properly....all the best
The mac version is "incomplete", and certain things I need to do just can't be handled via the gui. So, external editing has been the only way to get that done. It's been working fine with IV, although cumbersome, I had no choice, as they aren't eager to complete the mac version.
If it works for you, more power to you, but I hate windows and avoid running it as much as I can. I do make use of parallels, for things that don't exist in mac native versions, and I hate doing that.
And it's not simpler, with having to run a virtual machine, and although that is fairly well integrated with the mac, it's not 100% and complexity of use remains. It's cumbersome anyways.
I tried XVII when they finally updated it to make it mac native, but it was extremely crashy and totally unreliable. I kept using IV for that reason. And only recently I gave it an other try, finding it wasn't crashing like it was at first, so I figured I'd try doing something with it, but it's still as incomplete as before, and I had to use the external editor to do what it just can't do by itself, and that's when I ran into that problem that screwed up by work.
I spent a bunch of time entering a schematic, ran a few early sims with it, which worked, and then it all went crashing when I edited externally. That sucks and it's not helping to adopt the newer version. Until I get a proper fix for this, I will go back to using IV.
The main difference is likely to be mostly from models. If they're not quite like the real thing, then this can be the main source of deviations from real world.
I'm not giving up using it, but until I get a solution to do what I need to do and correct those things it did, I'm sticking with IV for now.
So what can I do to salvage my sim then? It seems all the entered stuff is there, but it now reads it wrong because of encoding issues. That's stupid!
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