Not very hapy with theCyclone III FPGA Starter Kit

Yeah, it is pretty crappy documentation. What good is a reference design that is 1) encrypted and 2) has no documentation?

After a long time of head scratching I have figured out that you can use sopc builder to make a jtag_uart to communicate with the byte blaster stuff so you can do a non-toy design and see something pop up.

I've got my own problems trying to get around sopc builder not being able to find my nios:

one or more components could not be located (altera_nios2) yadda yadda.

So, yeah, you're not alone in being pretty disappointed (annoyed).