Hi Chris,

I remember almost 16 years back, during building one small project I could not find 7447 decoder. I did used a binary counter with 4 active high output and made a diode matrix to drive an emitter follower NPN transistor for every segment of "7 Seg". It was bit messy but it did work and I was the only one out of 26 students who completed the project within given time, because those days in our area, to find out chip like 7447 was difficult, so none of my fellow got that chip.
Try the same technic if you find it okay for you.

Rauf