DE2-70 Read Flash without Nios2

Hey,

I want to store a data in the external flash and read it when needed. The examples I've seen use NIOS2 processors - I don't want to use a processor and would like to have it in verilog.

I was hoping someone may have done this and could give me some pointers - or even better the code needed to do this.. Seems strange that most of the examples for this board try to use a softprocessor and c code rather than hdl to do this stuff?

Thanks..