Help with Xilinx Parallel Cable IV.

Just one: get a Platform USB Cable. Much more reliable, simply works, under Windows and Linux.

I too have had nothing but trouble with Parallel Cables. After days of fiddling around with BIOS settings, trying a handfull of different PCI plug-in cards, trying a dozen different PCs, I've found that most parallel controllers in motherboard chipsets and add-on-cards only support speeds up to 1.5 MHz, if you look at their datasheets. In iMPACT, you can only select speeds of 200kHz, 2MHz and 5MHz (can't remember the actual numbers, but something along these lines), so it always drops down to 200kHz. I'm not sure, but I believe in ISE9 you can now finally set some speeds between 200kHz and 2Mhz, so it's at least a little faster. Doesn't explain, why the exaxt same card worked fine in one PC and now doesn't in another, though...

Anyway, I highly recommend getting a USB cable, if you can afford it. The only problem there is that detection of the maximum possible transfer speed doesn't work reliably. Usually, iMPACT sets it too high, so you get "Invalid ID code returned from device"-errors or something and have to manually select a slower speed.

HTH, Sean

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Thanks Sean. I am going to borrow a USB cable, and if it works I'll buy one. I had just hoped I could get the cable I have already to work, but it seems like USB is the way to go. I remember a few years ago folks were complaining about the USB cable, but it seems like it's solid now.

Just a heads up if you are interested in Linux:

If you want to use the cable in Linux you are going to have to mess around a bit if you don't use a supported kernel. Especially if it is a new development kernel which WinDriver don't support yet.

There are ways to work around this such as the excellent WinDriver replacement library posted on this newsgroup some weeks ago. (I'm using this method lately and it seems to work ok for me.)

With the parallel cable you can use XC3SProg in Linux, but it will only work in Cable III mode unfortunately.

/Andreas

Same problem. When upgradong from win2000 to winXP, pcIV stopped working. I filed a WebCase, and a Xilinx engineer tried to solve the problem. No way. Now I work wih pcIV as a PCIII and whenever I can, I borrow an USB cable

Regards,

zara

Sure, either search for LD_PRELOAD on comp.arch.fpga or look at

/Andreas

Can you point to where? :)

-- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software -

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C

Much appreciated, thanks.

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C