If the discussion here is about the use of the old 8255 I think that you can take many others ways to do your job.
You can use 74F573 as out ports and 74F244 as in ports. In this case, you must to take care about the memory map! Another way is drive this chips by some lines of a port and so on. Other way is the use of any 8051 derivate that can help you with your task. If you need many ports and your derivate have I2C bus you can use a I2C IO expander like PCF8574.
Now in any case, I think that understand why your system doesn´t work can help you with this and another problems. Please check your system and think about it.

Roberto Muñoz