Hi folks,
this is starting to drive me nuts:
I use a Xilinx Parallel Cable IV to program some big FPGAs (big as in V2P70 and the like). Now Impact and Chipscope always open this cable in "Compatibility Mode", meaning it is used as a Parallel Cable III and takes FOREVER to download a bitstream. No matter what I do, no matter what settings for the parallel port I use, it keeps getting detected as a Parallel Cable III. This is a problem we've been having constantly for years now... on some machines it works fine, on some it doesn't, and on some others it sometimes works but sometimes doesn't.
The only certain thing is that it never works on the machine I am currently working on when I have a lot of testing to do and big bitfiles to download.
Now, I've googled my eyes out for this, read all the answer records, tried everything mentioned there and everything I could think of:
- I tried all possible BIOS-settings for the parallel port: ECP, EPP, bidirectional, different DMA-channels, different IRQs; you name it, I've tried it
- I tried uninstalling the cable drivers from Xilinx, reinstalling new ones. I tried uninstalling the entire ISE, making sure there's nothing left in the Windows-Drivers-Dir, reinstalling ISE. I've tried every ISE-version from 4.2 to 7.1 without success. I've tried doing a fresh install on a freshly installed Windows, nothing.
Now we bought one of the new platform cables for USB, works much better, but those are expensive and we have probably half a dozen "Parallel Cable IVs" in use.
Any pointers, any hints?
cu, Sean