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I do not design micky mouse systems - I design highly complex systems for aerospace applications and my company purchases large quantities of Altera parts for use in these applications.
I have always used the internal simulator - I have tried ModelSim and in comparison to the original simulator it truly sucks.
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I'm surprised that you work on complex aerospace systems without using test benches... Most of the aerospace customers I know about ask for VHDL testbenches for FPGA designs.
Yes you need to learn a new tool and it can be hard at the beginning, but writing real testbenches instead of using a manual tool such as the Quartus simulator has some advantages:[list]
[*]automation. After a certain level of complexity, manual verification of an IP or system can be very tedious and error prone. A testbench can do complex operations, check timing, events order, or other operations that can be difficult to do by hand just looking at waveforms
[*]tracability. A test bench can write a report in a log file, and this can be useful if a history of a module needs to be recovered in the future
[*]regression testing. This one is the most important in my opinion. Later in the development process, you will have some bugs and will need to do some corrections in the code. With an automatic test bench, you can very easily perform a new test after your modifications to check that you didn't change anything to the functionality. This can save a lot of debugging time.[*]code coverage. Some tools can perform automatically a code coverage report, which is also sometimes asked by some customers (although I think Modelsim Altera Edition doesn't do this)[/list]
Although I agree that the Quartus simulator is a great learning tool, it can't replace a real HDL simulator in a professional environment.
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