AS Configuration of NiosII hardware & software images

If your nios code has access to the outside world then you can also include code to update the epcs via software - and also only update the code part.

If your code fits in internal memory you might have a space problem doing that though.

However you might be able to request the individual bus cycles from the external system with minimal (or no) software support.

Getting non-jtag programming working is useful - especially if the software is being written outside the hardware team (which I'd have thought was more normal than the Altera build scheme implies).