LCD's Serial or Parallel ?

What ever you do, stay away from the 117 series serial controllers such as the one sold by ModernDevice.com. It uses a PIC chip written by some guy. Its closed source and it does NOT understand standard Carriage Return and Line Feed, you have to send odd chars such as "?R" for a return and "?N" for line feed. Unfortunately there are MANY boards that use this cpu and it doesnt understand standard ASCII