sof and elf into epcs with quartus programmer

[Altera_Forum]

I've searched Altera and this forum pretty extensivly and have not found the answer to this question. Is there a way to take the FPGA configuration info and the NIOSII software and create a pof file to configure an EPCS with the plain old Quartus Programmer. I do NOT want to use the Flash program for this particular application. I found a description at Altera that makes use of the elf2flash utility with the --after option. I am using Quartus and NIOS v5.0 and it does not seem that this option is supported. I could easily write a little program to combine the srec's of the config and software but I cannot see how to get back to a pof from there. Quartus convert programming files seems to require a sof. It doesn't let me just give it a single hex file I create with the nios2-elf-objcopy. 

 Why is this so difficult???

[Altera_Forum]

Please check the wiki, 

http://nioswiki.jot.com/wikihome/operating...flashprogrammer (http://nioswiki.jot.com/wikihome/operatingsystems/%c2%b5clinux/flashprogrammer)

[Altera_Forum]

Your choices are: 

 1. Upgrade your toolset... 5.0 is darned old and, if I remember correctly, doesn't support what you'd like to do.  - NOTE: You'd have to write a custom bootloader using this methodology. 2. Use the Flash Programmer....not sure why you have an aversion to it in the first place.  Regards,  - slacker