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It would be nice to find a way to get rid of the Tcl middle layer, but I assumed I would have the same problems as you of trying to reverse engineer the Altera DLL's.
Maybe someone else knows the trick...
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You can use the FTDI drivers under Linux and add the USB-Blaster to its list of devices. You can then access the USB-Blaster directly as a digital I/O device. The USB-Blaster USB byte-stream protocol was reverse-engineered a while back:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/urjtag/index.php?title=cable_altera_usb-blaster I reverse-engineered the JTAG-to-Avalon-ST/MM protocol (the FPGA-side)
http://www.ovro.caltech.edu/~dwh/correlator/pdf/altera_jtag_to_avalon_analysis.pdf (
http://www.ovro.caltech.edu/%7edwh/correlator/pdf/altera_jtag_to_avalon_analysis.pdf)
So that I could control the hardware directly, with no Altera code involved.
Under Windows, the FTDI DLL won't let you add another VID/PID to the list of devices it'll allow you to control, but I think you could get around that by erasing the EEPROM on your USB-Blaster (you can always program it back again using FTDI's FT_PROG).
If you've got more time to waste on this than me, feel free to email me directly and we can chat :)
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
