I also experienced a really weird unrelated problem in Quartus Programmer 18.1 in Linux while I was testing things on one of my computers. I could see corrupted outgoing USB traffic in my Wireshark capture — before the FT245 or CPLD were even involved in the equation. This problem affected all of my blasters, not just the CPLD+FT245 ones.
I still sometimes notice a long (~30 second) delay the first time I try to do a JTAG operation in Linux after plugging in any of my CPLD-based USB Blasters. It doesn’t happen every time, but when it does, it seems like jtagd is hung up waiting to receive a byte, which never happens, so it times out and tries again. It works fine after that.
Since I was already exhausted from dealing with all of the other USB Blaster problems at the time, I completely lost interest in digging further into these particular nagging issues, so I left them alone. Until now. AI has opened up the ability for some of these little mysteries to be closed out without having to spend a bunch of time investigating them. Believe me, debugging can be an exciting challenge, but intermittent issues are just not fun to diagnose at all.
Last year, I repaired an NZXT Signal 4K30 USB capture device that I bought on eBay for cheap. It was completely dead, and the cause turned out to be a bad solder joint on an inductor, which prevented power from getting to a crucial part of the board.
After I fixed it, I tried using it to capture signals from a bunch of different HDMI source devices to make sure it worked correctly. As I said in my last post about it:
I did find one 720p60 HDMI source that it doesn’t like — the captured video shows up as pink and green.
In that post, I also pointed to a few Reddit threads (1, 2) where similar issues had been observed on a PS5 and Nintendo Switch, respectively.
Here’s a snapshot of what captured video looked like from the one HDMI source that it didn’t like:
Around the same timeframe, I began cobbling together another computer using a motherboard from an eMachines EL1200. The EL1200 was a cheap machine that came out in 2008. I found the motherboard on eBay for next to nothing, and it was also easy to find an Athlon X2 4850e to go with it. This particular motherboard only officially supports 2 GB of RAM in each of its two slots for a total of 4 GB, but I knew that 4 GB DDR2 sticks existed, so I went ahead and tried to put 8 GB in it. Why not? They were easy to find and inexpensive.
The 8 GB of RAM worked perfectly fine and I was able to boot into Linux. This honestly didn’t surprise me too much. I ran memory tests and they all came back perfect. The computer worked great with 8 GB of RAM.
Then, I tried to enter the BIOS setup by pressing F2 at startup when the eMachines splash screen came up:
