Dual port RAM synchronisation

Well, its both of your problems. The rams have no synchronisation in them, it is up to you (well, probably the guys who wrote the firmware) to come up with a method of synchronisation. This would usually take the form of an interrupt. An easy way is to set a couple of memory locations to be the interrup drivers, so both ends can interrupt each other - and then you only perform a read when you've been interrupted. This helps stop you reading the ram so much, as you should only read it when there is something new to read.