We did an 8051 design for an office messaging display. You've probably seen designs like this wherein you have a matrix of LEDs and the customer wants to scroll messages and graphics to the display from any angle.

The 8051 @ 12Mhz worked for us. We updated every pixel for each screen update and were able to do any sort of multiple scroll and animation we needed.

Sorry but I can't share code as my company does this for money. :-)

But I will say, it was both fun and easy.

-Jay C. Box