I am very interested in your ideas...

I take it the Altera part is a cpld or fpga??

However, back to my original question - I can't really see what the big deal is, you only really need some generic routines to create a bitmap, then send it to the display using a driver routine for the specific display. I presumed that someone would have written code to create lines, circles etc in this bitmap?? I thought I could then write the display specific stuff to support my lcd - am I missing the point on how difficult this is???

The Triscend 'decoder board' looks like it just has buffers and a bit of logic on it, the software can't be to bad if they have written routines to support most lcd's. I presume they just store text bitmaps of the different fonts you use and generate the rest of it on the fly??