Little toy didn't quite work out

I had spec'd a little toy to print out, one character at a time, the daughter of my friend's name on a single 16-segment led. I'm good at digital logic, but significantly less so at electronics in general. It seemed safe enough. All the outputs worked, but actually displaying it on the LED display caused me significant grief and I ripped apart my breadboard after ripping out my hair. Lesson learned, don't try to manually drive those 16 LEDs in parallel.

I searched and saw mention of using a MAX6955 ... but at ~$30 just for the driver, I'd rather spell out her name whenever she wants me to. That, and I have no experience at all with programming a microprocessor (not that I'm opposed to learning) nor the equipment to do so.

Certainly there's got to be an easier way to do this... right? Please?

Can you post a schematic?

Learn to program a PIC, they are easy to learn to program and will make short work of your task with very little hardware required.

If you check my PIC tutorials I have one driving an 8x8 matrix of LED's that will scroll a text message in all four directions.