Quartus II under Windows7?
Wastrel
machine. Now my $%^&Quartus II software won't run, and Altera says
Win7 ain't supported. Anybody know of a workaround? I'm developing on
the Altera Cyclone III FPGA on the Altium Designer NanoBoard 3000.
Thx,
Bob
Jon Beniston
What particular part of the software are you having problems with?
Jon
glen herrmannsfeldt
Win7 has an option to tell the program that it is running on
a previous version of windows, as far as such checks are concerned.
As far as the design software, that is likely to work.
As you might need a device driver to talk to USB to download
the bitstream, that might be system dependent, such that it
won't work.
-- glen
Derek Simmons
Have you found any advantages to running Quartus II on WIndows 7 or a
64 bit OS?
Thanks,
Derek
Wastrel
Well it installs alright, but Altium Designer 6 can't find it -
whereas it did on my XP box. One problem is that Windows 7 likes to
put 32 bit legacy programs under Program FIles(x86), but Quartus won't
install there because it can't handle spaces or special characters in
it's filenames.
Wastrel
The bitstream gets downloaded by Altium Designer via JTAG and that
part still works. Can you elaborate on the previous version of windows
option. As I mentioned earlier, running Quartus under Program
Files(x86) won't work becuase Quartus won't install under that
directory.
Thanks,
Bob
glen herrmannsfeldt
(snip, I wrote)
>> As you might need a device driver to talk to USB to download
>> the bitstream, that might be system dependent, such that it
>> won't work.
> The bitstream gets downloaded by Altium Designer via JTAG and that
> part still works. Can you elaborate on the previous version of windows
> option. As I mentioned earlier, running Quartus under Program
> Files(x86) won't work becuase Quartus won't install under that
> directory.
Right click the program icon, properties, compatibility tab,
and choose the version you want to be. As I understand it, this
is what windows returns when the program asks which version it
is running on. It seems that you want to do this for this installer,
which is checking which version it is installing under. You might
also do it to the installed program.
-- glen
Rich Webb
Tell it to use the 8.3 name for the directory (one way of seeing this is
to do a "dir /X" from a command prompt). For the directory above, the
name would be "c:\progra~2\".
--
Rich Webb Norfolk, VA
Wastrel
> On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:19:07 -0700 (PDT), Wastrel
>
Rich and Glen,
Thanks a lot for your help guys. I was able to install it under c:
\progra~2 and direct windows to run it in XP service pack 3
compatibility mode. Unfortunately, now Altium throws a "Unsupported
version of Altera Quartus II" message. Nice try though!
Thanks again
Bob
Jon Beniston
> On Apr 21, 1:08 pm, Jon Beniston <j...@beniston.com> wrote:
>
> > It's running ok for me on Windows 7 64-bit.
>
> > What particular part of the software are you having problems with?
>
> > Jon
>
> Well it installs alright, but Altium Designer 6 can't find it -
> whereas it did on my XP box.
So could that not be a problem with AD6, rather than Quartus?
> One problem is that Windows 7 likes to
> put 32 bit legacy programs under Program FIles(x86), but Quartus won't
> install there because it can't handle spaces or special characters in
> it's filenames.
There is an option to say where you want to install it which worked
fine for me.
Jon
David Brown
Alternatively, avoid "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)" like the
plague - these are seriously stupid path names MS has chosen.
When installing almost any new software, you have a free choice of the
installation path - if you think you might ever want to refer to the
program or its files by path name (such as the command line), use
something like "c:\Progs\" as the base instead of "c:\Program Files".
I have no idea whether this will help you here or not, but it will avoid
the awkward installation path.
Wastrel
wrote:
> On 23/04/2010 21:39, Rich Webb wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:19:07 -0700 (PDT), Wastrel
>
> - Show quoted text -
Well Altium support got back to me and said basically the same thing
you guys are: "It works OK for me"
They told me to verify that the system environment variable
"QUARTUS_ROOTDIR" pointed to the right folder - it did. I upgraded the
OS to Windows 7 Professional from "Home Premium" still no joy. When I
run Windows' compatibility troubleshooter it comes back with
"Incompatible Application" so there's something funky going on. I'm
wasting way to much time on this stupid problem, but it's not so easy
finding an XP box anymore so I'm not just sure what my next move is.
radarman
If you are running Win7 Pro, and your hardware supports
virtualization, you might consider installing the XP VM from
Microsoft. It's a full-function version of Windows XP SP3, and it runs
in a VM environment a bit like Parallels on the Mac. (IOW,
applications appear on the desktop like any other, rather than in a
separate VM window) Best of all, it's free for Win7 Pro and higher.
Of course, you would need to install both Altium and Quartus in the
VM, but that should replicate your old environment fairly closely. I
believe the VM is 32-bit only. While it will run on a 64-bit OS, you
will be limited to less than 4GB of RAM.
Note, I haven't tried it - since my only Win7 machine doesn't have the
right CPU support - but this is the sort of scenario it was meant for.
glen herrmannsfeldt
(snip)
> Well Altium support got back to me and said basically the same thing
> you guys are: "It works OK for me"
> They told me to verify that the system environment variable
> "QUARTUS_ROOTDIR" pointed to the right folder - it did. I upgraded the
> OS to Windows 7 Professional from "Home Premium" still no joy. When I
> run Windows' compatibility troubleshooter it comes back with
> "Incompatible Application" so there's something funky going on. I'm
> wasting way to much time on this stupid problem, but it's not so easy
> finding an XP box anymore so I'm not just sure what my next move is.
As I understand it, starting with Vista Windows won't run 16 bit
code anymore. It seems that a surprising amount of such code
still exists and causes problems, though I am a little surprised
it would happen in this case.
-- glen
Wastrel
First of all, thanks to everyone for all the on point suggestions -
much appreciated! Altium support got back to me last night with the
following:
"Check the 'Ignore version of vendor tools' in DXP---Preferences---
FPGA---Devices View.
It is common that FPGA Vendor releases leapfrog the Altium Designer
releases. So this setting will enable you to run with the Altera
Quartus release that did not exist when Summer09 was released. "
This did the trick, much to my relief. As grateful as I am to be back
up and running, I think this key information should have been included
in a help file, quick start guide or otherwise made available to the
hapless newbie...
David Brown
I know you've already found the answer, but this is just for
completeness sake...
There are some suppliers that still produce systems with XP installed -
Dell being perhaps the best known. They refer to it as "Win 7 Pro
downgraded to XP", and charge extra for it. I think of it as "Win 7
/upgraded/ to XP", and think it is worth the money. There are many
tools in the embedded development world that don't play well with
anything other than XP. Win 7 64-bit works better than XP 64-bit, so if
you need more than 3.5 GB memory, Win 7 is a good choice. But other
than that I have seen no reason to pick Win 7 over XP, and XP is always
faster on the same hardware.
As has been suggested, an alternative is to use virtual machines. I
recommend Virtual Box - it's perhaps not quite as integrated as the "XP
mode" of Win 7 Pro, but it is much more flexible. It's also free and
cross-platform, and you can move the virtual machines between different
hosts.
Wastrel
>
> - Show quoted text -
I'll have to look into some of these virtual machines. I'm sure this
won't be the only speedbump I hit doing embedded development under
Win7. What kind of performance hit can I expect? In the old days I
used to fool around with CPM 2.2/Z80 emulators under DOS and WINE
under Linux and my impression then was " well isn't that cute", but
never considered really working in that environment. I imagine they
have come a ways since then.
Bob
Leon
It works OK for me on my laptop with Win7 x64. I have it installed in
the default c:\Altera directory.
Leon
David Brown
> On Apr 28, 1:40 am, David Brown<da...@westcontrol.removethisbit.com>
>> I know you've already found the answer, but this is just for
If you are going to try virtual machines, I'd wait just a little bit
longer until Virtual Box 3.20 is out - it's in beta testing at the
moment. It has some nice new features such as better multiple monitor
support, faster guest booting and host-initiated execution of guest
programs.
Performance under VirtualBox is very good for most purposes - I use it
extensively for things like embedded Linux build systems that do a great
deal of compilation. Some software, such as graphics-intensive
software, is going to be slower - 3-D acceleration exists but is not
perfect and has limitations (don't expect to use the guest for running
modern 3D games). But for most purposes the overhead is no more than a
few percent.
For old DOS software, the most powerful emulator is DOSBOX. It doesn't
really matter if it has some overhead - a modern PC is still much faster
than a DOS-era machine.
WINE gives variable results depending on the system, the version of
WINE, and the program you want to run. For some software it works very
well, others not at all. If the software in question is a stand-alone
program it is typically fine, but if it interacts with many other
programs, or hardware drivers, it will have trouble. DirectX
acceleration works to some extent. But if the software runs okay, it is
may be faster than running natively on Windows - several of the key WINE
libraries are faster than the native Windows versions, and the WINE
programs take advantage of Linux's faster file system. Graphics, on the
other hand, will often be slower due to extra translation layers.
Number crunching will be the same - it runs natively on the processor.
Wastrel
wrote:
>
> - Show quoted text -
Interesting David. Thanks for the info.
Bob
imtia...@gmail.com
> much appreciated! Altium support got back to me last night with the
> following:
>
> "Check the 'Ignore version of vendor tools' in DXP---Preferences---
> FPGA---Devices View.
>