Ah no, sorry Steve... I was just complaining about the fact that the programmer cable you need to use ISE is ridiculously overpriced,
Yes. However the $10 payed on ebay helps a lot. There are also compatible clones of the Xilinx USB cable available new for about $120 with cables on the same ebay.
uses a deliberately oddball connector, forcing you to buy overpricedcables as well.
No. The overpriced USB box comes with the cable and 2 mm flat ribbon cable is not exactly exotic.
Compare to the Digilent cable which is < $40USD and does exactly the same job, but unfortunately isn't recognised by the ISE stack.
Right. And the cable we include could be used with minimal hacking to connect to a Digilent cable. To just load a bit file the Digilent software works perfectly. What you don't get is the ChipScope - a logic analyzer inside the FPGA - but you need a full (expensive) Xilinx software to use that anyway.
So to just load configurations made with free tools you can either use a cheap Digilent USB cable of a used Xilinx one.
As I wrote before if you have a parallel port and don't mind waiting 15 seconds for the configuration to load you can use a $12 cable that is compatible with Xilinx iMPACT and friends.
-Alex.