Uart

I need your help to figure out how to connect the PC RS232 to the NIOS UART on a C III starter board. I have a daughter card that exposes the FPGA pins, so I have access physically to ALL I/O pins, Also 5 V and 3.3 V pins on that card. I also have a RS232 to TTL tiny external board that is connected to the PC Serial cable, and has 4 pins as output. The four pins are Power, GND, Tx and Rx. I tried to connect the Tx and Rx to their perspective equal Rx and Tx in the NIOS (pin assignment is correct) after I added the RS232 UART in the nios using SOPC builder, with no flow control.

I cannot send or receive on either sides, I mean Nios running c code cannot read or write, the function call stuck. Also on the PC the c code cannot read or write it does also stuck on the function call.

I am using ANSI standard C code for fopen, fgetc, fputc, etc..

Can you help me please to find out how to connect the PC to the UART on the FPGA?

I appreciate it. Thanks.