Hardware Reference Design

Having yanked apart a couple of dead USB blasters, and Terasic blasters (which are equivalent), it's a shame Altera won't release the firmware in the CPLD so you could implement your own 'blaster' on boards. I'm assuming Terasic licensed the code and/or firmware file for their boards, since they can be treated identically as real USB blasters. This would be nice because I often find myself using 'instrumentation ram' in designs, and using the in-system memory editor during initial development to get data out of the FPGA. (before software is ready) I just tie the single-port (with instrumentation enabled) block ram modules to the internal data bus, and let it act as a mirror.