Well I looked at the user manual for the DE2, it looks like it only uses the MAX232 which is primarily for converting voltage levels. Have you looked on your CD for design examples of using the Port. RS232 is about as easy as it gets for a serial connection. Unless you need to, don't worry about all the control signals that a traditional 9 wire design uses, if your design is simple start with Rx, Tx and GND (or maybe only TX and GND) and your own port. There are examples on the web to look at too (opencores is a place to start), but be careful, they may introduce the extra control signals, which you don't need for basic communication over RS232. Look at the protocol, use a basic version like 8N1. And probably just implement a TX module, that send 10101011 over and over. You will need to use a clock divider or PLL (pll is best, but may be hard for beginners to understand exactly what a PLL does, but you can use it without necessarily understanding everything about it) to get your 9600 baud frequency to transmit. Then it's just a matter of generating the sequence and understanding what a start bit, stop bit, and data is.
Another thing to note is that typically receiving modules tend to sample the data bits in the middle of the transmitted bit; you use the start bit to realize "something happened" and then you synch to the first edge of the start bit and aim at sampling in the middle of each bit as that gives you as much "slop" as you can get, given that source and receiver clocks will never really be in tune and running at _exactly_ the same rate in the majority of circumstances.