Yes you need the USB Blaster driver installed. This board has an embedded USB Blaster implementation (pretty much all these Altera development boards do) so you need to connect it to your CPU via USB to be able to communicate with the board.
You could try launching the Quartus Programmer tool in Quartus Prime Lite and see if it detects the embedded USB blaster.
It should. Then you should be able to select that USB Blaster device, and do a scan and your MaxV device should show up in JTAG.
If you can't get the above working then either your USB blaster driver did not install correctly or your development board is misconfigured.
Since I don't have one of these boards I can't really say anything more detailed.
Typically these boards come pre-programmed with the POF (compiled binary program file) for the demo sample application.
As to why the BoardTestApplication.exe appears to do nothing I suspect is it has issues finding your embedded USB Blaster device.
As to the utility of the board, you don't really need to have the BoardTestApplication to use it, it is just a nicety when you first power on.
The other files installed by the software have the definitions of the chip top in verilog and vhdl that you would use to build your own design.
New Contributor
