Breathe new life into this very nice software package from the 90's. UTIBoard and ULTICap are very capable tools for Schematic entry and PCB design. I use it still as of today with pleasure.
If you still have a ULTIBOARD version for DOS, WITH THE DONGLE and the license file (lic100.pwd), you can still successfuly use it today. (Warning: using dosbox with ULTIboard on Windows is dangerous, we have experienced multiple events where the DONGLE was DAMAGED beyond further use. This NEVER happened with the Linux version (this dosbox version)
I found that it runs very succesfuly in a dosbox on Linux. The only difficulty may be that you need the parallel port to be on the motherboard, as the dongle is accessed via that.
The DOS ULTIboard postprocessing only creates a RS274D format. I created a Perl tools that transforms these RS274D files into RS274X formatted files, that are accepted at most PCB factories today.
From the Linux commandline everything is started by using the command ulti. This is a shell script and creates a .bat file for the dosbox environment.
The (uploaded) 'dosbox' is a special version that has a patch included for use of the parallel port.
The .doxboxrc file sets eveything up and includes the definition for the parallel port.
The Ultimate programs are put in a folder ~/Ultimate
The designfiles goed into ~/ultiproj/
TO BE COMPLETED
[2026-04-10]
Since some time there exists a fork from the original DosBox project under the name DosBox-X. The DosBox-X project fully supports the direct access to the parallel port from a DOS application !! However, you should have a REAL parallel port on your PC. Only a very few USB<->LPT dongles have the correct chip for this, be forewarned! So now I am using DosBox-X with UltiCap/UltiBoard with success and the red HAsp dongle on /dev/lp0 on Linux.
Note: I have seen dongles 'eaten' by the Windows version of DosBox in the past, that never happened with the patched DosBox version as in this GitHub archive. Be cautious.