Mixed SW/HW project

Hi,

I'm pretty much new to this Altera DE2 board and have some questions regarding this.

We are trying to do a mixed SW/HW project with Altera DE2 board and are stuck at the point where we combine these SW and HW components.

I did search on this forum for my questions and it seems that I need to use

NIOS/SOPC builder to do a mixed SW/HW project.

But I'm still quite lost here so I'm asking you guys once again.

To briefly explain what my project does, we are implementing a digital alarm clock on the FPGA board and trying to display the clock on the C GUI program on the computer. So we basically need a general I/O b/w our C program and the verilog.

The software versions that we use are

NIOS II 9.0 sp1

Quartus II 9.0 sp1

First, I'd like to confirm whether this is possible to do with DE2 board.

It would be really appriciated if you can explain how this can be done if possible.

Second, we are using custom c libraries for our program and we would like to know whether we can use thses libraries in NIOS/SOPC.

Thank you in advance.

Andrew