I don't remember if they supported the 8k in the first versions of Quartus. The first version I looked at, I had the Altera rep drop over and showed them a NAND gate (or something similar) and it would hang their software. It was really bad. I may have the second release installed on my old PC if you want me to check to see if it supports it. The problem I think you are going to run into is that they sold that software. The unlicensed version was very limited (both MaxPlus2 & Quartus). When the PCs stopped providing a printer port, it put an end to their license dongle. Intel had already bought them and it was like pulling teeth to get them to get me a node locked license. MaxPlus2 had already been shelved for some time by then. So, make sure you can actually target your devices before you get into it too deep.
I did have a look at how I was programming the 8k. It appears that I was using the original ByteBlaster, which connected to the PC's printer port. It appears that I had reverse engineered the programmer and created a PAL for it. This was eventually placed into an 8k FPGA (along with other logic). I used the Intel HEX format and then wrote software to support their ByteBlaster. All of that is rather pointless as I assume you are going to roll your own programmer or buy an OTS one that supports USB.
It appears that I did use the POF file at one time by stripping the header and dumping the data directly to the FPGA (see code below). This must have been very early on.
/* POFBIN.C */
/* Program to convert ALTERA POF files to binary. */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <dos.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <process.h>
FILE *infptr;
FILE *outfptr;
int argc; // Number of line arguments
unsigned int data;
unsigned int count;
void main(argc,argv)
char *argv[];
{
printf("ALTERA POF to Binary Conversion\n");
printf("Ver. 1.0\n");
if(argc != 3)
{
printf("Format: C>pofbin input.xxx output.xxx");
exit(0);
}
if((infptr=fopen(argv[1],"rb"))==NULL)
{
printf("Can not open input file %s.",argv[1]);
exit(0);
}
if((outfptr=fopen(argv[2],"wb"))==NULL)
{
printf("Can not open output file %s.",argv[2]);
fclose(infptr);
exit(0);
}
printf("Parsing header information\n");
for(count=0; count < 0xa3 ; count++)
data=getc(infptr);
while((data=getc(infptr)) != EOF)
{
count++;
putc(data,outfptr);
}
printf("Processed %d bytes\n",count);
fclose(infptr);
fclose(outfptr);
}
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