Vivado out of date / Better solution for programming only ?

[paulscottrobson]

Describe where we can find the problematic topic

Flashing the FPGA Max 10 with Quartus (Section Z of the full book)

Describe the solution you'd like

This is not current with regards to Xilinx's website (the web installer is no longer present) and is also possibly unnecessary, see below.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Xilinx provide a "Lab" version of Vivado 2020.2 ; this has no license and does very little other than program or debug FPGAs, which for most users is what is required.

It is much smaller (1.2 Gb vs 40 Gb) and the process is much simplified.

I do not (yet) have a physical Mega65 in the Commodore form so this is on the Digilent A7 board, but the process is very similar to that described in the manual but without all the faffing about with licenses - you start the Lab version, select "Open Hardware Manager" "Open Target" "Open New Target" and let it detect the A7 board, add the QSPI device (as per the manual) and program them.

I will write the documentation if you wish but I don't have latex skills so someone else will actually have to convert that :) It's also on Linux but the process is almost identical I think as it's a Java app and the Windows FTDI drivers stuff presumably applies as previously.

Additional context

• Vivado Lab 2020.2 requires Ncurses5 installed or a compatibility library in Arch Linux.
• May be worth considering having the MCS file in the release on filehost (it's on the autobuild, but it took me a little while to find it)