Few days ago I finally decided to put my FT245BM chip in use. I soldered small wires to all 32 pins of the chip so I could use it without a PCB and to my surprise windows recognised the chip when I plugged it in the USB port.
If someone else if planning to build something similar and you don't have a PCB I recommend everyone buying one of the small evaluation modules rather than doing it the way I did. Although the result was better than I expected I wouldn't like to do that soldering job again.
Other parts I'm currently using are PIC16F877 and 240x64 T6963C display.
I wrote some simple code to the PIC and made a test program to windows. In my first tests writing a full screen bitmap took 118 ms so I think the speed is ok for the first test. I'm currently running the PIC at 10 MHz and I'm planning to bump the speed to 20 MHz to see if it makes any good. Something I was very impressed with was the fact that I didn't see any cpu usage increase when I wrote full screen bitmaps in loop to the lcd.
These were just the first results I got so it will be interesting to see if there's going to be any improvement later.
I could also try this with AVR but I just happened to have the PIC already connected to the LCD so I chose it for the first tests.
Pictures 
. Its near the same like the philips. And why dont use hardware available instead of buying new 
