More toolchain hell

MOVED TO OTHER LAPTOP BUT NEWER QUARTUS CAUSES DIFFERENT PROBLEMS

The other laptop had Quartus 22 installed instead of the 17.0 I used on the original laptop. I chose the older release as I found incompatibilities that were insurmountable based on changes Intel made from 17 to 22, where the demonstration files from Terasic, based on 16, would not successfully create any demonstration examples. 

The first issue that cropped up was a request to upgrade the IP in my project, which is the SoC component to be generated as well as all the bridges and clock modules I included. Once these were updated I tried to regenerate the SoC core but received the error that I needed Windows Support for Linux in order to proceed. That is already installed and active on my system. I remember this was one of the drivers for falling back to Quartus 17 on the other laptop. Ergo I can't proceed on the second laptop. 

POKING INTO THE TCL SYSTEM USING THE CONSOLE PROVIDED BY QUARTUS

I started to hand execute the TCL script that was failing, the one that will do the pin mapping. Indeed it fails because it tries to load the package SDC_EXT which complains that it must be called from Quartus_sta (or quartus_fit). 

I then issued the command to list all the packages available to load from TCL and did NOT see Quartus_sta, Quartus_fit nor SDC_Ext in the loaded list nor in the list available to load. This seems to be the crux of my issue, a defective setup of the packages that will be called from TCL.

IF THINGS WERE DOCUMENTED . . . .

If the role of this script and the pin mapping were documented, along with the files it chases through to collect its information, then I might be able to modify the target files myself with the proper information. However, they are not documented and therefore this avenue is closed off, barricaded and forever forbidden. .

HINT FROM MORE SEARCHING

There are some similar issues that suggest that it is root directory and environmental variables for Windows that, if not set correctly, can lead to these sorts of failures to load packages. Time to carefully study my environmental variables, the install location for Quartus and any other hint as to the defect.