Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorI share your pain. I have been struggling for months getting sample designs as well as custom designs to work with the CycloneIII 3c25 NiosII Embedded Development Kit. One of the problems, as you mentioned, is that most of the sample designs and support literature are for outdated versions of the development tools.
FINALLY I have come across a design example specifically for this dev kit that is entirely in version 11.0 of the Quartus II tools. Like just about everything from Altera, it doesn't work out of the box, so I am having to work out some glitches in the the example C code (unfortuatey not my forte), but otherwise it appears to be a very clean design that is well documented (a first for Altera, I believe). I suggest that you jump right in with the latest version of the Altera development tools (version 11.0) since you are just staring out anyway. It uses Qsys rather than SOPC builder, which are very similar, but you can be sure that the support for SOPC Builder will eventually evaporate. As far as I can tell with my limited experience with it, Qsys seems to be an improvement over SOPC Builder. Here is a link to the sample design: http://www.altera.com/support/examples/nios2/exm-net-std-de.html Good luck with your project.
