I have a Maxplus design which is a year or more old which was compiled with Maxplus. So far so good. I am required to make a small alteration.
The licence has expired and Maxplus seems obsolete so my only option is to download Quartus.
Oh dear - I have never come across such a long winded process to convert things to Quartus.
After all the changes - Lo and behold it won't fit!
Is this called progress?
What on earth is wrong with allowing the use of "outdated" software for "outdated" designs?
Are you saying Altera cannot/willnot generate a non timebombed license for this ? I thought that nonsense was in the past, and that all tools vendors allowed changes to designs, if not whole new designs.
Someone told me recently there was a legal precedent to this 'denial of design database' access aspect as well.
and that is not as uncommon as we would hope. This, and other version control reasons, are the compelling reason for NOT timebombing EDA software.
Nothing, and many do that. I thought Altera was one of them ?
-jg
Hi Fred,
That's nonsense. If you have a valid subscription, Altera will still give you Maxplus features in the license. If the features were not in your latest license, you can simply request them.
Best regards,
Ben
Fred, And if you even have problems getting a new license for the MaxPlus, as others suggest....
An easy work around is to simply set back the date on your computer. Has it's problems, but works fine here for getting MaxPlus to run. (You won't want to have "email" simultaneously running on the same machine, for example.) You may want to get a copy of "touch" off the 'net to mess with source file time & dates to solve any file time dependency issues. Take a look at the license.dat file -- found it my Max II install directory, YMMV -- to see what the expiration date is to see how far back you need to push your clock.
A quick look at the Altera website gives links for downloading Maxplus and getting a license for it. They make it clear that they recommend moving to Q2, and that Maxplus is for legacy designs only, but they also make it simple to download and license. Did you actually try getting a new license, or did you just assume that "obsolete" means "unobtainable" ?
Given that Altera estimates a slight improvement on fitting on average when switching from Maxplus to Q2, I'd guess their support people would be interested in seeing the design and finding out what went wrong.
Altera does not have any policy to stop users from using our legacy MAX+PLUS II software. We do encourgae users to take advantage of the latest Quartus II software performance and features but there is nothing to stop you from continuing to use MAX+PLUS II software.
If you purchased an Altera subscription package your license should be perpetual i.e. it will work even after expiration. If you downloaded the free MAX+PLUS II BASELINE software the license will stop working after 6 months but you can simply request another free 6-month license extension on the Altera web site at
I am sorry to hear you had an unpleasant experience trying to convert your MAX+PLUS II design into a Quartus II design. Altera has put a lot of effort into making this process as easy as possible and we have received a lot of positive feedback. We even went as far as including a MAX+PLUS II user interface option in the software and put a lot of effort into the "Convert MAX+PLUS II project..." feature to make the process as simple as possible. The Quartus II software on average offers 15% higher fmax performance and while consuming 5% fewer device resources when compared to MAX+PLUS II software. For more details refer to the Quartus II Handbook Chapter : Quartus II Design Flow for MAX+PLUS II Users at
In the Quartus II software you might want to try changing the Analysis & Synthesis Optimization Technique setting from the default of "Speed" to "Area" to try to solve your fitting problem. I also encourage you to submit a service request at mysupport.altera.com so we can look into your problem specifically.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Rob Kruger Altera Software Marketing
Many thanks for your reply and for the others here.
I apologise for not looking harder. It wasn't immediately obvious that I could still get licenses for obsolete software and indeed to be able to download obsolete software.
It is a bind that it is time limited though but good that I can get another licence file if I change machine.
Many thanks again.
Guilty!
If requested I'd be happy to send them the design.
My experience was that Maxplus was very touchy about dates and was smart enough to recognise "turning the clock back". Mine was an experience with Win ME where 2 files were dated some time in the future on a genuine OEM installation disk which came with the PC.
I was using Baseline for which the license expires after 6 months.
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