Altera feature downgrades w/ 10.x

Expanding to Rysc's comments, here are some instructions:

Setup the path to the Modelsim (or other simulator) executable which can be done by the GUI under Tools>Options>General>EDA Tool Options (This may not be needed with ModelSim Altera Edition).

Set simulation options under Assignments>Settings>EDA Tool Settings>Simulation. Select More EDA Netlist Writer Settings. Turn on Generate netlist for functional simulation and any other options you want.

Then Start Analysis and Synthesis. Then Start EDA Netlist Writer.

For more on Simulation, read qts_qii5v3_01.pdf (http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/qts/qts_qii5v3_01.pdf). As I scan through the document, it is clear to me that the document is not very easy to read for somebody without a lot of experience with different EDA tools. It is clear that Altera needs a simpler document/tutorial to describe how to use the ModelSim Altera edition, hopefully showing that it is not that much harder than the old native tool.

As for the claims that BDF and/or TDF is going away, all I can say is that Altera has no plans to do so. Too many of our own regression tests are written in BDF and TDF so for sure it is easier to support these languages than to migrate all our tests :-)

As demonstrated by us bringing back LPM Megafunctions in V10.1, Altera cares about every customer, large or small, and reads and reacts to feedback in this forum. I don't know if we will even bring the simulator back, but for sure we will look into improving our GUI and documentatiton to try to improve the user experience for the cases described in these posts.