After a bit of wrangling I got the COP411 to run. When in test mode the SK pin outputs the CPU clock which makes it easy to synchronize the PIC to the internal operations. I have not yet gotten it to spit any data out but it's looking promising.
sean: what did you do to make it spit out the data? I reset the chip, let it run then threw it into test mode but SK didn't wiggle and it didn't spit out anything on the L lines.
When I try to enter test mode according to the data sheet, things worked OK with regards to SK going active but I haven't been able to make it spit anything out because I have to enable the L lines.