> OK, strobe it, -- got it...I didn't realize you had to do that

Yup, you're on to it. Didn't realise the source of your frustration.
As you've found out, trying to do it statically results in a whole
row and a whole column lighting. Which isn't much use unless
you're trying to scare vampires

You'll see the strobing in commercial units if either they're
scanned reasonable slowly (the result will be tilted characters
as the LEDs in successive rows appear to lag behind - the
fewer the number of LEDs you assign to a block, the smoother
the result) or you flit your eyes while looking. Same flashing you
see in a LED lit by AC

> or even that you could with LED's

LEDs can be pulsed extremely quickly (eg IR remote controls,
wireless data transmitters or lasers such as the ones in tag
games)

> I don't think my 4mhz 16f84 is going to do too much heavy
> lifting here.....

Nah. Apart from sending data to the shift registers and timing
the display delays it's not got much to do

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