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I tried both the latest version of VMWare (workstation 7.1) and VirtualBox, and neither could capture the USB-Blaster to sniff from Linux in a VM. I installed Ubuntu 11.04 (Wubi - binary blob on the windows partition), and it works great.
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I stopped to update my copy of Cygwin, and so a web search, but could not see a version of Wireshark I could just try under Cygwin.
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Apart from being able to access the USB Blaster through ftd2xx.dll, how do you want connect to the FPGA on the DE1/DE2 side?
Did you notice, that DE1 and DE2 implement a second set of software JTAG lines between the embedded USB-Blaster CPLD and the FPGA? The interface is used in the DEx_USB_API demonstration for data transfer from and to the Control Panel application.
Alternatively, you have communication options based on the VJTAG channel, e.g. the JTAG UART.
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This is where I am fairly ignorant - I have as yet never made use of JTAG or VJTAG ....
I have been using an "8-bit port into block of registers" with a simple 4-byte address and read/write data protocol, via the FTDI chips, partly inherited from an early set of fpga modules, and partly extended by myself .... been using it for a number of years, for a range of fpga projects.
I am trying to port this to the Morphic II - frustratingly is seems to sometimes work but mostly not, so I expect the state machine breaks when run faster. If we can build a bi-directional byte-stream vie the usb blaster to the FPGA, this could work on the DE1 as well ? This would be the first part of the project. The second would be to write a "block" transfer mode, to read the contents of a large block of memory.
At this point I really need advice on how to build a 4 byte-stream interface from the PC to the DE1, ideally as fast as possible. Then I can immediately run quite a bit of code.
Writing is : Write 4 bytes
Reading is : Write 3 bytes (or 4), Read 1 byte.
Not very efficient, but very flexible.
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