Got a couple of these ISE Electronics Japan 256×64 VFD displays on eBay cheap:
They were a lot bigger than I was expecting, and look really nice. There is some slight unevenness in the brightness which might be down to the psu I was using, and the fact that they are usually designed to be used with a filter.
The interface is parallel and pin compatible with Itron displays. The command codes are different though, so I had to adapt my software. The display has two graphic layers, one of which can be configured as a text layer. The interface is faster than the iTron one, not requiring any delays in I/O. The RAM layout is a bit odd though, horizontally incremented addresses for text and vertically incremented addresses for the graphics. The plan is to interface them to USB using an Atmel AVR. At the moment I am using the parallel port but it eats a lot of CPU time (not to mention the bulky connector and the fact that parallel ports are fast going out of fashion).
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