Though I doubt the O/P and his colleagues understand precisely what's meant by "WTF" it's possible they do and I agree that you probably have "hit the nail on its head." If they do understand what it means, then they're certainly justified in taking offense.

I personally was not suggesting the O/P and his colleagues are totally in the dark, but simply that they have, as students often tend to do, skipped a few vital steps along the way.

I'm not in agreement with Steve's comment that using external memory mapping for their controller is a "good" thing for the reason he states, but only because I suspect they haven't yet figured out the way in which external memory is interfaced in the 805x architecture. That's why I suggested they simulate the bare T51 core using some code to access external RAM addresses and monitoring the control signals.

RE