pcdangio:
Yea I'm definitely using the knock-off ones... didn't feel like spending $600+ just on ICs haha. I guess I'll be paying up anyway with the amount of extra time I have to put in to get the knock-offs to work right.
I've done the same thing. You can get like 50 of the knockoff chips on eBay for $25 or even a little less. For a hobbyist trying to make a cheap display, using the genuine chips is really a cost shock. Anyway, if it does turn out to be SPI length, there is really no huge performance penalty breaking that chain of 60 displays up into to 10 chains of 6 displays and using some logic to select one chain to dump data to at a time, possibly using six 74HC138 (two each for a 1-of-10 selection for each of the 3 control signals).