[tails4e]

This is a very good and detailed intro into the basics of FPGA debugging, or specifically in this case using the FPGA to stimulate and monitor an external device.

Using the ILA core would allow you to monitor the outputs in real time and draw a waveform which may be more useful for advanced tests. Some additional ideas could be:

1) loading a BRAM with some vectors and then playing them automatically at higher speed and monitoring the result.

2) similar to the above but driving vectors from a soft processor such as microblaze for more automated debug/stimulus

I was going to suggest hardware in the loop simulation, which used to allow a simulator to stimulate and monitor hardware - but it appears this now supports only system-generator and HLS use cases, and the generic RTL use case is deprecated.