I like the idea Kai. I'll have to do a bit of research as to if this is realistic for the design. Bunches of shift register ICs deffinatly won't work in my case due to board space limitations.

Hmm, I'll have to think about this a bit, but I bet some sort of combined fifo\shift register setup might do the trick without having to rely on a high-speed variety 8051 or a pld.