Altera ByteBlasterII with Windows 7

[sebmaster]

Hello,

Well I have just finnished soldering up a circuit I have been working on with a MAXII at the centre.

I come to program it and Quartus complains that the kernel mode driver has not been installed.
I tried follow the instructions to install the driver and after much investigating have discovered that Altera don't support 64 bit operating systems.

At the moment im the process of making a 32 bit virtual machine but I REALLY don't want to do all my development in this.

Is anyone using a ByteBlasterII? If so any hints on how to get it to work in a newer OS?

 

[ckaa]

Have you gone through these posts on the Altera Forum :

https://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19233&highlight=windows+7

https://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3534&highlight=windows+7

From what I gather I think using drivers from Quartus 7.1 or 6.1 maybe a workaround. You could try and give this a shot!

 

[sebmaster]

Thanks ckaa,

I might see if I can get an older version of the drivers and see what happens if I try to install them.

Unfortunately I dont have a USB Blaster, so my driver issues are slightly different.

I tried installing the Win2000 ones as legacy but Windows claimed it couldn't find any suitable ones. I assumed that this and the refusal to load the installed driver indicated a security problem and was looking up how to circumvent it when I found that Altera don't support 64bit systems with their ByteBlaster driver.

I tried to run it in XP Mode (I have a 32 bit VM in this) but still nothing.

In the meantime I found an old laptop with no display that I am using to try and connect to my CPLD but my JTAG cable is refusing to work; I am getting quite fed up of this CPLD and am wishing i'd just bought a Terasic USB blaster to begin with.

 

[ckaa]

Yikes, that doesn't seem pleasant at all!! I am sorry I couldn't be of more help...I am trying to migrate to a Windows7 machine but still haven't tried anything. If I do come across a Byteblaster solution will let you know!

 

[sebmaster]

Thanks ckaa,

No it isn't! I haven't progressed much since my last post in respect to Windows 7. The JTAG cable is working well now on the old laptop though. At the moment its leant up against a desk (for airflow) and just stays on 24/7.
Luckily it is able to act as a JTAG server, so my Win 7 development PC can connect to it as if it were an ethernetBlaster.

If you want to do this though a hint - add the server using the 'jtagconfig' command line tool, for some reason the Quartus GUI didn't work - some sort of authentication error.

Good luck with your Windows 7 migration. One thing I can say is that now it is all set up Quartus runs excellently on 7, very fast compile times so no complaints.
If I may make a suggestion though, just buy some sort of USB Blaster; I spent about £25 on a PCIEx LPT port and the usb cable would only have been marginally more, plus one of the posters on the Altera forum pointed out to me a program called Buzz: https://www.jtaglive.com/
Apparently it can acctually check the integrity of the tracks between the pins of devices on PCBs - that alone makes me very tempted by a USB Blaster!