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FT2232H with libMPSSE. It is even advertised as a USB-to-JTAG chip.

Terrible drivers, pinouts, etc. for the ridiculous price of $6-10.

Could you explain why? A JTAG master seems easily bit-bangable unless you require high data rates?

Indeed my understanding is that it should not require crazy hardware requirements - it's a serial protocol clocked by the programmer.

Here's an Arduino project to program CPLDS/FPGAs using XSVF files https://github.com/wschutzer/xsvfduino

I'd say that the cheap programming cables are abundant and already compatible with the vendor tools so there's not much motivation to reinvent the wheel.

TMS is hard to manage. High data rates are exactly the issue.

Any MCU can bitbang JTAG at 100kHz. Try doing it at 30 MHz sustained.

Whatever happened to the Jtagulator? It no longer seems to be available.