I need to shiftout a nibble

Well that's going to make things complex. The chip has data shifted in MSB first, starting with the data byte. But how hard can it be, really? Just split the data byte into two nibbles. The first of which then gets four 0's tacked to the front (if I store it in a byte-long variable, this should be automatic) and the second gets tacked to the front of the control nibble.