It looks to me like he did do the project for real -- the write up mentions programming the PIC to emulate the other part. Based on that I would guess that you

It looks to me like he did do the project for real -- the write up mentions programming the PIC to emulate the other part. Based on that I would guess that you could pull out the hacked chip, and replace it with the 74LS193 and it would work as normal.