I got a chance over the weekend to download this program and play with it some. It will accept its input in several different formats. Among these, the VCD (value change dump) format stood out as fairly simple and easy to understand, partly because it's a plain text file that you can experiment with using your favorite text editor. From what I understand, it's also a fairly standard format that's used by lots of other EDA tools.

Anyway, I made an AWK script to translate the log files produced by my firmware into VCD files suitable for input to GTKWave, and had some waveforms on the screen in fairly short order. Digital signals looked great. Analog signals were okay, except it seems to auto-scale them vertically and doesn't bother to put any kind of labels on the vertical axis to tell you the signal values. I found that to be fairly annoying.

I found the program to be just a tiny bit clunky, not so much because there's really anything wrong with it, but just because its interface is a slightly different than what you'd expect from a Windows program. That's easy enough to understand, of course, because it's not a Windows program! It has its roots in *nix. I used a Windows port, and although it didn't need cygwin as the earlier version that Jan mentioned apparently did, I did have to install a great big pile of DLLs before it would run. It seemed speedy enough on a 1.7 GHz laptop with 1/2 Gig of RAM.

All in all, this turned out to be a pretty good deal. The price was right (free), it was easy enough to get running, and it will probably be useful every now and then in the future.

-- Russ