Creating interesting clock, have a few ideas but need advice driving 200+ LEDs.

Projects General Guidance
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polyglot:
Riva: not really. The 7219 will drive only one maybe 2 LEDs per segment, not the 10+ required for these big digits.

I realize this, that's why I said

You could drive both the 60 ring LED's and the segment LED's from MAX7219 chips if the individual segment LED's are wired as part of a 8x8 matrix (not in series or parallel).