Amiga SPICE is a program for simulating electronic circuits

Summary

SPICE is a program for simulating electronic circuits, the name is an acronym that stands for "Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis". Originally the program was created by Laurence Nagel at the Electronics Research Laboratory of the University of California. It was released as public-domain and the release included the source code, which then meant that it was possible to port the program to other systems, including the Amiga. More information about the history and other versions of SPICE can be found on its Wikipedia page and on the SPICE download page of Berkeley University. SPICE is a valuable tool when designing electronics. It provides an important step between creating the design and building the first prototype. Back in the early nineties when I was studying electronic design the use of SPICE was part of the curriculum. At home I used the Amiga version, which happened to be slightly newer than the version we used in class. And I still tend to use a descendant of the original program as part of my job, but now in the guises of LTspice and Ngspice that run on a modern PC. The Amiga version I'm now going to use is version 3f5, which can be found on Aminet compiled for 68000 or for 68020 with FPU. This article is not intended as a tutorial, but more as an example of using the Amiga for productivity. I'll try not to get too technical. Using SPICE 3f5 SPICE is a command line tool and takes a text file with a description of the electronic schematic as its input. The text file will also contain commands that describe the type of calculations SPICE needs to perform. After performing these calculations SPICE will print the result back to the CLI/Shell window by default. The input file The very first line of the input file is treated as the name of the circuit. Lines that start with an asterisk are treated as comments and skipped when the file is processed. Circuits are described by placing a component on each line with its connections and value(s). The i...