EP1C12Q240C8 and NIOS II

[Altera_Forum]

I'm a student, just starting out with FPGA and VHDL, so I'm kind of in the dark about a few things. We were lent a "UP3 Education Kit". The board is a up3-1c12 board (aka ep1c). I have successfully used Quartus II v9.1 to design, program and run a basic logic design on the board (programming it using active serial). I am now trying to build and run a NIOS II processor on the board, and C++ software. I tried following the various tutorials, but they never matched what I had- e.g. they would reference parts not available in the SOPC builder. I finally discovered that the ep1c was dropped from NIOS II with version 6.2. I then installed the versions of NIOS and Quartus that were on the CDs (instead of the current version), so I'm now using v5.1 of both tools.  

I now have design examples to work from, but they are all compiled for a board with a EP1C12F324C8 chip, not a EP1C12Q240C8. Every document I've found references the EP1C12Q240C8, I can't find anything the says they even built a UP3 1c12 kit using a EP1C12F324C8, yet every design example is built for that chip, not mine. Looking at www dot altera dot com/literature/dp/cyclone/ep1c12 dot pdf  (I can't post links yet, it's a pdf with pinouts for both chips side by side) I can see how to translate the pins from the F324 to the Q240, but, not every pin used in the reference designs made for the F324 has a corresponding pin on the Q240, nor can I just leave the NIOS II design untouched (e.g. it references 10 LEDs, whereas my board only has 4).  So my questions are:  1) are there ANY design examples built for the EP1C12Q240C8 that I can use as a starting point without trying to guess how to remodel it for my board. Anywhere. I can't find a single example, actually designed specifically for this board. Is it rare? Really obsolete (you'd think there would still exist files for it, somewhere). If there's not an official one, does anyone have a project they've built that will let me run C++ code on this board that I can look at?  2) If that's not an option, what steps do I need to take to compile, run etc. a design example made for the F324 on a Q420? Can I just reassign the pins that have a 1-to-1 correlation, and pick unused pins for the one's that don't exist on my board? What other changes do I need to make to the design or NIOS II part?  3) Is there a manual for a UP3-1c12 kit built on the F324 instead of the Q240 that I can reference so I can see what some of these pins that are mapped in the design examples are? e.g. there are pins for external flash memory in the design examples that don't correlate to any pins on my board. Is there an interface to an external flash device on that board that's not on my board, or are those pins attached to some on board flash chip? Do I just remove the external flash from the NIOS II design and replace it with some other memory?  I realize that the typical answer to most of these questions is "try it and see", which is what I'd say. Unfortunately, I've done that. I can get a project I think will work to compile, I can put it on the board using the JTAG, it says it programs, but then when I try to get any code to run, even just using the hello world programs, I can't connect (it says something about unable to reset processor, yes my unused pins are input tri-stated). So I don't really know how to determine what is and isn't working.  <edit> or should I be trying to port ep1c6 projects instead, as the pinouts are closer...</edit>