driving seven segment user display

Thank you FvM.

I'm inexperienced from both theory and hands on here. I am doing this seven segment driver for my self tutorials. I've been looking at it for all day and all night because I thought it didn't work. All I was trying to do was to drive all the 4 digits on the display with the same number controlled from the same DIP switches.

Until I gave up and switched off the lights to my brightly lit room and saw that the 4 digits were actually displaying what it should but too dim for me to see!!. Dim displays, dim me, what a match!

Now that I'm happy to go on, I cannot yet figure out how to feed the input with 4 different sets of codes having just 8 DIP switches. I'm sure there are ways for doing that with just my laptop and fpga board at home without needing external signal generators and ribbon cables?

Thanks.