I have the UART working finally.  I was not initializing all of my registers.  I set the lower byte, but assumed the upper byte was reset to zero.  It was not.  That's one big thing I've learned about TTL - you really need to initialize everything manually.  I have a simple echo program working, so next up would be the monitor/bootloader.

But I'm still not working 100% yet - the RAM is not working.  But I think once I debug that, it will be 100%.  I'd reallly like to get this working before Christmas - so close!