What target are you programming? Is it an EPCS4?
It seems that you have solved the problem.
Several years ago i got an Altera "USB Blaster" programmer, which turned out to be not-genuine.
It worked great since then, on commercial, home-made and China-produced FPGA boards.
But there is a catch - it only does so under Windows.
I've recently moved my dev environment to Linux, and while Quartus and the rest works nicely, the programmer - not so much.
I tried every version of Quartus from 12 up, and in every one of them the programmer works intermittently in Active serial mode - it would erase the flash, but then fail at a random spot during the programming with a "Can't access JTAG chain" error.
The only difference between 12.0 and 15.1 is that in 12.0 it takes less than a second to restart, so i can spam it a few times to get it to work, while in 15.1 it takes 10-20 seconds to start and fail.
So, the question is - have anyone encountered any such problems, either with knock-off Altera programmers, with Linux, or with both at once?
Bonus question: As knock-offs go, how bad is this one?
It seems that you have solved the problem.
Use good quality short shielded USB cables
Pretty much any USB extension cable makes the thing act up, so the quailty of the cables does not seem to matter much.
And in the end it works fine on Windows, so whatever it is is software, i guess.
Are you sure that Windows is running as fast?
Aren't USB extension cables explicitly non-compliant with USB?
I found a nice workaround - a USB hub.
It gets weirder.
I found a nice workaround - a USB hub.
So, a 2 meter cable is plugged into the port. Connected straight to it the thing does not work at all, barely getting past chip erase.
Now, plug a hub into this 2m wire, plug the programmer into the hub, and voila - it works each time every time!
I guess the hub acts as a repeater or something like that?
Weird.
Anyway, that solves the problem for me.
I also looked at the parameters for the console version of the quartus_pgm - there are a few of them, but none seem to be any sort of rate setting.
So, whatever the software difference is, it's not at the surface...Are you sure that Windows is running as fast?Not really.
It seem to take about as long to program, but i don't know where to look at any solid numbers.Aren't USB extension cables explicitly non-compliant with USB?Huh?
Never heard of that before.
AFAIK there is a maximum cable length in the standard.