Application code residing in the EPCS

I have experimented with this quite a bit Rick, but obviously for development & test rather than an actual real product. The most I've done is to put a demo of about 300K into EPCS flash. To my eyes, the startup time wasn't any worse than having the code in parallel flash and having the boot-loader copy it over.... I am sure that it did in fact take more time but it certainly wasn't perceptable to me; if you really need to know the time I'd suggest playing with a system where Nios reset to a small on-chip memory that fired off a timer, and then jumped to the EPCS peripheral (to start its boot-loader). Your application could then stop the timer at whatever convenient point you want (alt_main entry, main entry, etc).