I have the LCD out of a HPW MAS2-IBIS2, which is a German controller found on buses,
The IBIS unit sends the commands to update the passenger info displays, play next stop announcements, tells the driver the next stop, if he's running late or early etc.
The LCD has a HD44780A00 control chip in it, so it should run on the standard arduino lcd library's, but it doesn't.
I read an old post on here that these old displays used a much slower timing than the arduino lcd library puts out, the IBIS unit has a battery in it dated 11.02.93
But also, this isn't a standard 24 x 2 character display, it appears to have a 2 line, 20 character display, possibly 5 x 11 dots but not sure on that, but there is a possibility it's a 20 x 1, with 5 x ~30 or so dots for each character.
not sure if you can make the dot structure out here:
But the really odd things is that after the end of the 2 lines of characters, there's what looks to be a single character portion.
This is a computer simulator showing what the lcd looks like when in use.
i have found that the backlight connections are reversed from other lcd's i have, pin 15 is the cathode, pin 16 the anode, but i can sort that easily when i make up another connector for this. but it's how to drive the lcd and get those weird character bits i'm worried about.