Someone mentioned using an Arduino to drive the pinball display as a tester.
Initially I dismissed it because I had an “activewire” microcontroller board here which was collecting dust.
 
Turns out the activewire board only has drivers for WinXP... none for Win7.
While at Frys today; I saw they had some Arduino usb devices for fairly cheap. I ended up getting a Nano which had 14DIO pins – barely enough to drive the display.
 
A few hours later; I had a working Pinball Display tester:
http://youtu.be/kz3ikA82iH8
 
I’ll publish the code later; but thought you’d guys want to see the display functional asap.
Tests all the digits and the BLANK functionality which is between the 9 and the 0.
 
Next step is to desolder the current display PCB and build a fully populated display based on the latest PCBs. Once I have a fully populated display; I can test all the digits and the 7digit emulation capability.