Proteus may be nice as a "babby's first electronic" program, but as an actual EDA capture tool it's a fucking disaster (we use it at work, I wish we didn't).

If you want to make a LED blink, buy a actual arduino. If you want to simulate actual analog electronics, bite the bullet and learn SPICE. If you want to actually layout circuit boards, buy ANYTHING else.

Basically, as soon as you have an actual, complex board, the DRC system shits itself, and you wind up having to manually, visually check your layout before manufacturing, rather then letting the software that's supposed to do it do the checking.

Shoutout to the open source KiCad EDA project.

Do you know another program that can emulate microcontrollers and preferably also other chips together with actual electrical components in a circuit and make them programmable and simulatable without actual real components ?

brief note: LTSpice is free and graphical. The learning curve is shorter than pure Spice.

Proteus can be very expensive if you want to go legitimate though. A single VSM license is upwards of $200. In most cases it's cheaper for a hobbyist to just buy the components and test out the circuit than to run the simulation.

That being said... it's super useful tool. I used a bootleg version of Proteus during undergrad. Coming from a third-world country where electronics labs are often severely under-equipped... it went a long way towards helping me understand the material I was covering.

> A single VSM license is upwards of $200

That's actually regarded as "dirt cheap" in the world of circuit simulators.

said hobbyist also needs to buy an oscilloscope though. Granted they'll likely need that down the road, but still...

https://circuits.io/ from Autodesk also has an Arduino. It works inside a browser. Nifty learning tool!