MacSpice 3f5 2.10.14

As its name suggests, MacSpice is an implementation for the Mac of the Berkeley Spice 3f5 electronic circuit simulator.
However, MacSpice is not merely a port of the Berkeley code, it incorporates many improvements ranging from bug-fixes to entirely new graphics, algorithms and solution strategies.
Spice is not easy to use, but it is a powerful tool once the initial hurdles have been overcome and the MacSpice website provides support and tutorials.
SPICE is a general-purpose circuit simulation program for nonlinear dc, nonlinear transient, and linear ac analyses.
Circuit simulation is a way of building and testing virtual models of electronic devices. It is usually cheaper and quicker to simulate a design than to build a prototype. MacSpice, like most circuit simulators, requires a text-file description of the circuit as input.
This netlist is a list of components and the nodes they connect to. Users may prepare netlists with a text editor, or derive them from a circuit diagram using a third-party schematic-capture application. MacSpice then builds a numerical model of the circuit and analyses this.
A command interpreter (shell) is used to specify the types of analyses that are required and how the results should be processed, saved or displayed. The high quality of the MacSpice command interpreter makes the automation of tasks straightforward.
Simulation is a tool, not a magic-wand. The quality of the results depends on the accuracy of the netlist and the device models use. Within Spice most devices are ideal its resistor, for example, has just one property: resistance.
A real resistor has parasitic inductance and capacitance; if these have a significant influence on the circuit, they must be added explicitly to the netlist.

System requirements:
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Enhancements:
- Graph cursors behave better.
- AC Sensitivity analysis now positions grid points accurately and can resume after interruption.
- Improved pole/zero analysis - negligible complex components are rounded to zero.
- Vectors use memory more efficiently.
- Better frontend performance when large numbers of vectors are in existence.
- The big_endian/little_endian flag is now implemented for rawfiles written in batch mode.
- Case-insensitive string comparisons are performed faster.
- A warning is now issued when breakpoints are being ignored, e.g. because pulse rise-times are shorter than the value of MINBREAK.
- var_free() and ctl_free() procedures re-coded to avoid potential stack overflow in extreme cases.
- Improved display of mutual inductance parameters by show.
- Improved numerical stability of interpolate() frontend function.
- Improved rusage statistics for interrupted transient simulations.
- Improved default behaviour of xd and alpha parameters for MOS3 devices.
- shift no longer causes a crash when it is given invalid arguments.
- goto $foo when $foo has no value no longer crashes.
- Cured potential history list corruption when set history = 0 is used.
Cured some minor memory leaks occurring during:
- conversion of circuit parameters to vectors;
- destruction of parse nodes referring to user-defined functions;
- tokenization of models with zero-length parameters.
- AC sensitivity analysis now works with non-linear devices.
- Correct evaluation of lists containing empty lists.
- Variables numdgt and rawprec now unset at the first attempt.