"IORD_8DIRECT" reads 32 Bit ?

jake, that is only a workaround and makes it nearly impossible to put something link a structure over such a memory where you have registers and memory areas within one external device, thats what ALL (yes all) profibus chips do that came across my desk over the last 13 years. these devices have serveral memory areas and lots of registers but only 1 chipselect. for some reasons like transfer speed you want to use memcopy and use a bit complex structures to make these devices handsome.

so what i did was to implement an sopc custom ip that is a tri state slave but monitors the byteenables during read access and disscards the not needed byte reads and delivers 0x00 instead, same value as the avalon switch fabric would deliver.

your suggestion could be of course a solution in some cases.

but i still wish that altera would handle these not needed reads and remove them.