Using a different simulator with Quartus 17

Discussion of developmental aspects of the MiSTer Project.
meepowl
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Using a different simulator with Quartus 17

Unread post by meepowl »

Hi,

I have been trying to get Quartus 17.1 running on Ubuntu 22. After a lot of messing about I can get Quartus itself up and running but at the expense of not installing ModelSim, which always crashes the Quartus installer. I am also unable to get ModelSim 17.1 running after installing it separately, despite installing what I think are the right i386 packages.

I can install Quartus 22.1 fine and the Quarta simulator which comes with it. I can also see that in Quartus 17.1, under 'Tools > Optsions' there is an option to set the path to various simulators, including Quarta. However, if I set the path and then choose either of the options under 'Tools > Run Simulation Tool' I get a dialog box saying (something like) 'No simulation tool selected'.

I have two questions:

  1. Is it even practical to use the version 22.1 simulator with version 17.1 to work with MiSTER cores or do I need to use the version 17.1 simulator just as I need to use version 17.x of Quartus?
  2. If it is possible, how do I go about properly setting up Quartus 17.1 to use the version 22.1 simulator?
  3. Is there another/better separate simulator I could use with Quartus 17.x which runs on Linux (specifically Ubuntu 22)? I can see there are a lot different simulators you can specify in the Quartus 17 options.

Thanks!

tcdev
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Re: Using a different simulator with Quartus 17

Unread post by tcdev »

I've only recently started MiSTer core development but I can only strongly recommend you ditch the idea of simulating in ModelSim etc and instead look at the Verilator template project for MiSTer. After years of FPGA development (incl. commercial) and using ModelSim and SignalTap, I am blown away by the productivity gains of using Verilator, especially with the framework built up for MiSTer. Rather than (only) looking at waveforms you can see the actual graphical output at several frames per second (at least)!

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