Could you make a quick youtube vid of it for both patterns? (tag as unlisted if you don't want it to show up in your channel)
Sean: I haven't checked out COP400 yet, but I will eventually. Or maybe another dev can make a driver for it. Good thing we have the CPU core emulation already.
About that Hitachi MCU: How does the pinout compare to HMCS42C? (HD44700)