Scripts for archiving legacy Altera software

In 2020, Intel published Customer Advisories ADV2011 and ADV2030 which formally discontinued MAX+PLUS II entirely and Quartus II versions released prior to 2014. Downloads of these software were removed from Intel's FPGA download center. By researching the various download infrastructures used by Altera over time, some versions were discovered to still be available if you knew where to look. This repository provides scripts and cached versions of metadata used to discover these versions and enable bulk download of them.

Altera's legacy download infrastructure

Prior to 2003, Altera mostly just placed downloads on their FTP server, ftp.altera.com, which is no longer online. Interestingly, the directory structure of the FTP server appears to be replicated on https://fpgadownload.intel.com despite disallowing directory listings.

In 2003, Altera switched to a scheme where downloads were vended via a web service. Individual downloads are identified by a query parameter named swcode. These appear to be of the form WWW-SWD-<product code>-<download id>. A partial list of swcodes, swcodes/scrape.txt, was assembled by scraping snapshots of various download pages via Wayback Machine. Additional swcodes for Quartus II downloads were discovered by guessing based on known supported platforms, released versions, and released service packs.

For Quartus II v13.0 (circa 2013), Altera changed to a different scheme that looks up a download URL by individual query parameters for platform, version number, edition, and filename. Version numbers changed to a <major>.<minor>.<service_pack>.<build> format.

Scripts

get_snapshots_for_url.sh

Uses memgator to download historical snapshots of a URL from various archive sources. Snapshots are saved to a snapshots folder.

get_swcodes_from_snapshots.sh

Scrapes swcodes from all the snapshots stored in the snapshots folder and dumps them to stdout.

get_metadata_for_swcodes.sh

Fetches metadata about swcodes from https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/bin/get-download?action=getDetails. Metadata is stored in JSON format as a file per swcode in the metadata folder.

get_download_urls_from_metadata.py

Extracts the canonical download URL from a metadata file and tries permutations of the filename and various base URLs known to hold downloads to find a working URL. Working URLs are written to stdout.

get_url_for_quartus_build.sh

Looks up download URLs for Quartus II v13 and later.