Mike, you seem to forget that most of us around here are professionals that do this stuff every day! If i kept on doing dodgy designs, I'd be out of a job. We don't 'know' - we've actually DONE it and got the t-shirt to boot.

You obviously didn't understand what I was saying regarding the 1mS tick - your code doesn't have to wait to write anything to the display - the interrupt code makes it happen in the background. The main code just puts what it wants on the display in a ram array and it magically appears on the display. Did you manage to understand how my 4bit lcd code worked that I posted some time ago. You seemed to think I was performing some 'black magic' or something - you seemed to be the only one suggesting that it wouldn't work!


As for your requirements - we seem to have a conflict. On one hand you want performance and small code, but yet you choose a graphic lcd with the dumbest controller! Let alone using a graphic lcd - the font(s) alone can chew up a bit of code space and then you have the code to write the font to the display and draw pixels etc. All not conducive to 'small code'.

So why the worry about waiting? The KS0108 is quite a bit faster than the HD44780 + derivatives. I recently interfaced one of these displays to a LPC2194 running at 55MHz. I had to put a few small (uS) delays in the code, but I definitely don't poll for busy - I just copy the ram array to the display.