WinCUPL issues

[floobydust]

Well, I've been using WinCUPL for a few years on Win7 Pro 64-bit. Quirky it is, not to mention it gets hosed up now and then and needs to be restarted (and even a reboot once in a while).

I recently started to do a bit of work in WinCUPL and nothing would work... just constant and endless errors. I even went back to my old working ATF22V10 working glue logic design and it failed as well... plus corrupted the Simulator files. No idea what happened, but perhaps numerous Win7 updates (which I still several times a week even now) were the culprit. In any case, I had to remove it completely, then reinstall it (a repair did not work, and also caused errors). After the reinstall and reboot, I went back to my original glue code and it worked again!

Lessen learned... WinCUPL might need a remove/reinstall every now and then if you're having endless issues.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

floobydust wrote:

Well, I've been using WinCUPL for a few years on Win7 Pro 64-bit...Lessen learned... WinCUPL might need a remove/reinstall every now and then if you're having endless issues.

Isn't Windows wonderful? Bit rot seems to be a recurring theme with Billyware. It is better, though, than the days of DLL hell...but not much.

[Proxy]

I'm not sure if it's fair to put the blame on Windows here since most other software works perfectly fine no matter how long it's been on the system.
it's likely just WinCUPL being very very old and not being fully compatible with modern OS' anymore, so it expects the OS to work in ways that are no longer true, causing it to break itself after some time.
i really wish there just was an open source alternative. why does Microchip even keep the software on live support anyways? how do they benefit from that?

[floobydust]

Well, I was dealing with Microsoft back in the early 80's.... professionally due to the nature of my work and that went on for many years, so I'll keep the dirt under the carpet! Needless to say, MS has a poor history of writing OSes... and I have a licensed copy of every one ever released. Several are completely useless, like Win98 and WinXP 64-bit, and others too (Win 8 anyone?). Win 7 Pro 64-bit is decent... but I only run it as a VM under Fusion (VMware on OSX) and only for a handful of applications that I use for 8-bit hobby stuff. WDC Tools, Dataman programmer, Atmel programmer, Quartus and it's programmer, ExpressPCB and maybe one or two other bits.

Microchip inherited WinCUPL, as did Atmel, IIRC. It's not on life support... it's just ancient code that hasn't died on it's own. My son also does a lot of software development for simulations, modeling, rendering, etc., he's not a big fan of MS OSes either, and prefers OSX (as do I). Still, I have an old retired colleague that is using Windows for 3D design and driving his CNC Router table and having very good success with it... so we can each have our own views... and mine go way back based on first hand experience with them.

These days, I use OSX as a main workstation with Fusion to run other OSes as needed (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD). I use FreeBSD for my router/firewall and my Plex media servers (on dedicated hardware). Linux is good for appliance stuff as well, but I don't like it as a workstation. It's been unreliable as a desktop and for virtual machines as well. It does work well as a 3D print server however... which is nice.

Come to think of it... I still have code kicking around for Xenix, BeOS, OS/2, QNX, Solaris and probably AIX as well.... but I digress....

[willie68]

My experience, the Win part of WinCUPL has many problems on Win 10/11. I didn't get it running.
Cupl on the other side (the DOS app behind) had no issue. So I made some Script for starting it directly. And a little tool, that generate both files (pld and Sim) from one source.

[Proxy]

Hmm, so would it be possible to set DOSbox up to directly start the CUPL commandline program with whatever file you want as its input parameter?
Or what program do you use to run DOS applications?

[willie68]

Proxy wrote:

Hmm, so would it be possible to set DOSbox up to directly start the CUPL commandline program with whatever file you want as its input parameter?
Or what program do you use to run DOS applications?

WinCUPL is only a GUI for the cupl tool, located in the shared folder. You have to use some flags on startup. If I'm back on my PC I can upload my script.

[willie68]

Here is the cmd file, which also starts the simulation after compiling, for the atmel stuff:

Code: Select all

@echo off
set LIBCUPL=e:\Wincupl\Shared\atmel.dl
e:\Wincupl\Shared\cupl.exe -jaxfsl %1

i use another tool before this, because i like to have one file for pld and simulation. So i made a small go tool, converting the single file into the two files pld and si with the same header, and doing some other stuff, like copy everything into a special folder, so that the original source files doesn't conflict with all the bunch of files generated by the cupl app.
If you like to use this, too, here is the github repo for that:

https://github.com/willie68/WCPLD

Readme for my tool is here:

https://github.com/willie68/WCPLD/tree/main/wcupl

i normally ptu the wcupl binary into the shared folder, where the cupl.exe exists.
Than i use this little command file:

Code: Select all

@echo off
set LIBCUPL=e:\Wincupl\Shared\atmel.dl
e:\Wincupl\Shared\wcupl.exe -jaxfsl %1
rem c:\Wincupl\Shared\csim.exe -l g16v8 -u c:\Wincupl\Shared\Atmel.dl TEST
if errorlevel 1 (
.\wcupl\%1.lst
.\wcupl\%1.so
)

A wpld file than looks like this:

https://github.com/willie68/WCPLD/blob/ ... 02SBC.wpld

[BigEd]

That's great - thanks - a DOS tool is much more handy, from my point of view.

[nollkolltroll]

I use cupl in Linux/wine without any problems. The WinCupl program never worked OK at all for me, regardless of OS, but the DOS executable is good.

[BillO]

I used to have problems with it on XP and Win 7 but I have yet to have any serious issue with Windows 10. Not sure if it's just luck or if it's happier on Windows 10.

Even the problems I did have previously were not a real issue. I never had any corruption or anything like that. Just the occasional abend.