#74 Can anyone read or convert old PCAD PCB file ?

[James Sullivan]

Hi,

First, thanks for maintaining BuddyCAD Viewer+ — it's a fantastic resource for a niche that's otherwise very poorly served.

I'm trying to recover an old PCB design from a binary P-CAD file, and PCBVIEW.EXE reports "database format not compatible." The file's header identifies it as:

Personal CAD Systems, Inc.
PC-CARDS Database file version : 1.02L 3.0 (01/20/88)

So it predates your earliest documented support (P-CAD v4.5) by a year or two, back when the product was still called PC-CARDS rather than P-CAD.

A few questions:

1. Is there any chance of support for this earlier format, even partial (e.g. net list / component list only, if full geometry isn't feasible)?
2. Do you know of any documentation for this era's binary format that might help, even if BuddyCAD itself can't read it?
3. Would it be useful for me to send you the file (or a redacted/sample portion) to look at? I'm happy to share it if that helps.

My end goal is to get this board's data into a modern tool (ultimately Altium), so anything that gets me closer — even an intermediate format — would be a huge help.

Thanks for your time and for building this in the first place.

James

[Buddy Lancer]

Hi James,

Thanks for contacting. I will now check this and let you know.
Seems it is some intermediate format between 1.02 and 1.03 DB versions.

Yes, it will be very useful to get original PCB-file.
I am not sure whether SourceForge share attachments to public.
So you can send that PCB-file to me - info at buddycad dot org.

Thanks.
Vadim.