The PRJC board is using who knows how many components (including the dreaded 8255) to achieve what could be done with two chips: a P89c668 and a UART. The P89C668 has 64K of flash and 8k of RAM inside and is ISP programmable. This makes all ports available for I/O since P0 and P2 are not tied up with memory access. Thus to do I/O, instead of going through 8255 initialization sequences (and posting your problems with those here) you just write to a port pin. I strongly recommend you get a board with an ISP chip. for dev boards that are not necessarily cheap, but very well build and documented, have a look at www.phytec.com

Erik