Compiling PUFF microwave CAD software on Linux

PUFF is the name of a computer aided design program for microwave circuits, developed at the California Institute of Technology. It allows one to easily edit a circuit and calculate and plot the circuit's scattering parameters. It runs under MS-DOS (and Windows in DOS mode).

The PUFF software is available for sale together with a book from the California Institute of Technology, and in Europe from UKW-Berichte. Although it is not free, it is quite cheap compared to other software; furthermore, in many cases it comes with with source code written in Turbo Pascal.
(Note: since making this web page available, several people have told me that their copy of the floppy disk did not contain the source code. I do not know details, so for the moment I can only advise you explicitly ask for the source code before ordering.)

The fact that PUFF comes with source code makes it possible to port it to other systems than the original MS-DOS. Using the Free Pascal compiler, most of the original Turbo Pascal code compiles without problems on Linux. The main part that needed work to get PUFF running, was the graphics part: Free Pascal did not (yet?) have support for using X11 graphics in a way that is compatible with Turbo Pascal, so some new code was needed. Furthermore, some miscellaneous other modifications were needed, in areas such as memory allocation and keyboard reading.

For people who would like to compile PUFF on their own Linux systems, I've made available a .tgz-archive which contains the needed files along with detailed instructions in the README file. Note that this tgz-file does not contain the PUFF source code itself; you must obtain a copy of this yourself, from one of the sources mentioned above.

The above (and latest) version (dated 2007-02-11) of this package works Free Pascal compiler versions 2.0.0 and later. If you have an older version of the compiler, you should use the previous version, dated 2006-01-31, instead; it is still available here.

Finally, here's a screenshot:

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