Legacy support seems to go for a loop

Altera_Forum · ‎10-31-2005

I still have a lot of NIOS1 designs out in the field. The terminal/serial port method is still the easiest to support and quite a few clients prefer to buy my systems with the old GERMS interface.

Problems I experienced since NIOS II:

1) Getting my hands on NIOS 2 ver 1 I could recompile but found that my Ethernet CS8900 interface was not working anymore.

2) Then I tried to Flash the AMD flash chip. Could read it but could not write or erase it. Eventually tracked it down to a bit of code in the GERMS monitor and rectified it.

3) Yesterday I tried to create a flash file using srec2flash (NII ver 5). The script creates the correct files but the compiler does not want to compile .s assembly files. You cannot nios-build any .s file. It comes up with conflicts with main, -start and globals missing. The only way I can compile a .s file is with a makefile. Even then I have problems linking it to a higher address e.g. 0x040000. Eventually I wrote my own copier code which now resides in my own GERMS monitor(makefile generated). I then flash the plain .srec file to flash which is then automatically loaded on power up (debug switch used as bypass).

I am not in the least interested in the IDE, and especially HAL. it appears that altera sees the legacy support as some illegitimate child and tries to discourage people from using it. The problem is that it fits ideally into a minimum system application.

So is Altera deliberately working errors into legacy mode to deter users from using it?

Is Altera planning to drop legacy mode in the future?

I am fully capable to sort out all the crap Altera throws my way and have done so since the release of NIOS II, but does it really have to be this way? I really thought that the problems would be fixed for ver 5.

I can't believe that Altera will accidentally release code that will neither flash out of the box or refuse to create flash files. Heaven only knows what problems I will find when I am deeper into the project (maybe compiler errors over x kb of code while compiling from command line ?)

VictorS