Problem Booting NiosII on Max10

[Altera_Forum]

Hi there, 

I got a weird problem with NiosII on a max 10 device (Max10 dev kit). I built a full project under Quartus 17.0 which was fully operational, and, before demonstrating it to my customer I wanted to check it with alternate parameters. Everything went well. Then, for the demonstration, I reverted the parameters (just the size of some filters embedded in the HW) to their original values, recompiled the project, not changing anything else, but NiosII does not boot any more?!? The project seems correct because, when loading the .sof file with Quartus programmer and launching the application from NiosII, it works fine. The hardware loads propely because I do have a HW life led which is blinking normally.  What starts to be weird is that I copied the same project on another computer. The only difference is that this other computer is not enabled for the IPS EMBEDDED license, so the processor is changed to a /e one instead of a /f in th eprevious case, and ... it boots properly from the flash. I'm using on both machines Boot Mode Option 2 (Reset vector: OnChip Flash, Exception vector: External RAM) with a single compressed image. BSP setting normally matches this setting.  What could be wrong? Would you have a idea where to search from now?  Thanks -jylo

[Altera_Forum]

Think I got it... 

Working on another project for which Nios code could not fit on the UFM block, I started to play with Boot Mode Option 5 and, as suggested, I added a quartus.ini file holding PGMIO_SWAP_HEX_BYTE_DATA=ON to my project. I'm now afraid that instead of placing this file in the project folder it has been put, by mistake, in the Quartus/bin64 folder... Meaning that all my compilations were using this file...  Sorry for this not very useful post -jylo

[Altera_Forum]

Well, that wasn't it... 

And the issue was even more stupid: Quartus II generates a .sof and a .pof file. After converting programming files, a new .pof file is created... I just picked up the bad one... bad luck! -jylo