NIOS II SOC SW Simulation Too Slow to be useful...

Has anyone seriously used simulation of a NIOS II SOC with SW to debug the design? Yes, I used AN351

to run and say "Hello World" in simulation but in a real full size SOC it takes forever to run.

I tried a very simple program that write to LED_PIO, and yes it runs, but it mostly accesses SDRAM.

What is needed is a NIOS II BFM that obeys the AVALON bus protocol but executes simple Read/Write (bus cycles)

instructions from a stimulus file. It does not run any 'C' SW!

Any suggestions?