Lattice Semiconductor should create some videos for ECP5 like they did for ECP2 and ECP3, which show how to install things when you get your new board. There's a quick start guide which gives a link which reaches page that has the demo software. It's not the most intuitive thing for a newbie, but now that I understand how it works it should be easier next time.
I'm looking at the scatter / gather demo, which sends large blocks of data through the PCI-Express bus, and reads it back after it is processed by the FPGA. It is a demo showing large volumes of data transmitted from a running win32 app, through the card into the FPGA, and then reading back, all in real-time through an OpenGL-like demo sending frame buffer data from one window, and receiving modified frame buffer data to display in the other.
If I can get this part working, then I'll have the ability to send any data I want to my card, basically at any speed. And hopefully I'll be able to set it up to respond to port requests for reads/writes, to allow me to setup ports with changing data for some of the controllers I have, otherwise I'll be in poll mode, which I'm not too keen on.
Thank you,
Rick C. Hodgin