yes, it should work as long as it is SAA1064. Good price!
It may be possible that you don't need it, but never tried without the chip inserted. It is just a driver for the 7 segment LED's as far as I know. I'll bet the pic just transmits HEX code to the driver IC for it to display the start channel. There is most likely a memory location in the pic where the start address is stored. If that is known then the memory location could probably be set using PICKIT3 and then downloaded to the pic. The start channel will need to be entered in HEX, I believe. The checksum will change on the pic once that is done, so don't be alarmed by that. I know that this works on SSR4 pic chip.