Pretty much, yes. Early Cyclones are probably in the same boat (and those are already 3V3).

I've personally kept an eye on 'dumps' of the older Altera chips on Ebay for a very long time, for production of both realized and future retro projects. Mostly MAX 3000 and 7000 CPLDs. One Flex (EPF8282AVTC100-4, times 114). Never used them though.

I've archived copies of Max Plus II 9.3 and 10.2, should anyone really need them (and some Quartusses (or is it Quarti ? ) 9.0 onwards).

To work around the unavailability of the free temporary licenses one could perhaps try using an old license while turning back the clock (the PC one, the one on your wall won't help).

That's good news. I have one of these boards and can see if I can make it work. I've been poking the MAX7000 that's on there a little bit, as you can still find those on ebay, but I didn't realize the software for the FLEX 10K was going to disappear. I'll try to make some time this weekend to play with it and I'll let you know if I make any progress.

Quartus ii 9.1 SP 2 Web Edition is probably the one you want. Later versions had the inbuilt simulator removed.

You can find the windows version on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/91sp-2-quartus-free

You can also find it at various universities for download:

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech
https://weble.upc.edu/asig/dd/

University of Coimbra in Portugal (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Jorge Lobo (Teacher at the university) has the Windows version, the special FAT32 Windows version, and the Linux version for download.
https://home.deec.uc.pt/~jlobo/altera/

I'm installing a windows version in a VM at the moment, I'll let you know what it supports.

I'm downloading that Linux version. I hope it's not just for RedHat or something! Willing to give it a try, thanks for the link!

Chad

Unfortunately the windows version of Quartus II 9.1 sp2 didn't offer Flex10K in the device list, though Flex10K came up multiple times in the directory structure. It might be licence locked.
Now installing 9.0 for a look.

Well, this is 9.0, looks like we have a winner.

I'll see if I can find a Linux version.

I downloaded and installed it on my Win10 laptop. It is able to compile the "Pong" program that I posted on this thread Jan 22. So it is looking really good. To be absolutely certain, I need to plug in a USB blaster and see whether it can program the UP2 board.

The readme file of Quartus 9.0 stated:

The Quartus II Design Software is supported on the
following operating systems and versions:
Windows XP SP2 32-bit
Windows XP SP2 64-bit
Windows XP Pro X64 Edition
Windows Vista 64-bit
Windows Vista 32-bit
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 for 32-bit and for AMD64
or Intel EMT64 64-bit CPUs
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 for 32-bit and for AMD64
or Intel EMT64 64-bit CPUs
SUSE 9 Enterprise Linux
CentOS 4/5 for 32-bit and for AMD64
or Intel EMT64 64-bit CPUs


So it seems to have some Linux support.
Bill

I was able to find reference to the linux version "90_quartus_free_linux.tar" along with an MD5 sum, but couldn't locate the file itself anywhere.

I'm downloading the Windows version right now, thanks for looking anyways! Alright FLEX, here we go!

Chad

There saw there are a couple more cheap boards on ebay, though the associated text says they are not shipping outside the US (no good for me).
https://www.ebay.com/itm/183924586506

I installed the 9.0 version of Quartus from archive.org on Win7 in Virtualbox on my Linux machine. After setting up the USB Blaster programming cable to be passed through to Win7, I was able to create a project, compile it, program it, and it works! I did have to install the driver for the USB Blaster in Win7. The drivers are in a "drivers" folder under the quartus folder - if you accept the defaults during install it's
C:\altera\90\quartus\drivers
and of course you have to let Windows know it's OK to install unsigned drivers (much easier in Win7 than Win10).

Thanks to everyone who helped narrow down and locate the version that works. Attached is a screenshot of my circuit (using 1 whole Logic Element!) that just reads from one of the dip switches and turns on/off one of the LEDs in the 7-segment display.

The configuration of the Flex10K doesn't stay when the power is cycled (it holds it's configuration in SRAM). It looks like if you want it to be configured on startup, you need an "EPC" configuration device. It looks like it's a serial flash chip, but it has smarts to run the clock and data at startup to load the bistream into the FPGA (more modern FPGAs just use a regular serial flash memory and they load themselves). There is an 8-pin DIP socket on the board for an EPC but it's not included on my board.

Those EPC devices do appear to still be available on eBay. The datasheet says it can be programmed over JTAG, so I'm assuming the USB Blaster cable can program it if it's installed, but I'm not sure how it gets into the JTAG chain. There are jumpers on the University Program board to put the MAX7000 or the FLEX10K or both onto the JTAG bus, but I don't see anything in the printed manual about using an EPC device. Later Altera trainer boards had a jumper to put the bitstream into a flash chip instead of loading it into the FPGA directly and then the chip would use that configuration if powercycled.

Thanks for confirming that it works now I need to get one at a reasonable price!

Wow! this thread took off. Thanks to those that helped track down the Flex10K Altera/Intel software that will work with the dev board.

I have installed the SW and am waiting for the board to show up which should be this Monday.

Greg

I finally managed to install USB Blaster on my Win 10 laptop and verify that Quartus 9 can compile and program the Flex10K70 on the UP2 board. The UP2 board does not have EPC1 installed, so Flex10K70 needs to be programmed every power cycle. EPM7128 have programming flash on chip, so it does not need to re-program after power cycling.

The USB Blaster driver does not have digital signature, so installing it on Win 10 is somewhat tricky. I read the on-line help and stumbling around with different way of powering up Win10 and finally got into a mode where it allows installation of driver without digital signature. I don't remember exactly what I did but can only say that it is possible to install USB Blaster driver in Win10.
Bill

PS, I downloaded Arlet's Verilog 6502 from GitHub and successfully compiled it with Quartus 9. The resource utilization of 6502 core is lesser than 20%, so Flex10K70 has plenty of resource to hold a 6502 core and other peripherals.