I am looking for something that preserves the state of the outputs before the chip is disabled.
The 74LS245 is very simple. It has Port A which is an 8 bit input that I connected to the bus, and Port B which is the output bus.
The DIR pin is set Hi so that when the E is low, whatever on Port A is written to Port B.
As I said everything works OK, except that when I disable the chip (so I could write to the other 74LS245 chips), port B goes into isolation state.