I always thought Frank van Gestel's modified init was pretty cool. It's the one I use. It calls a shell script (/sbin/userinit I believe) to do init type stuff. You manually call the player when you want to in that script rather than being at the mercy of how init handles it. It lets you get pretty fancy with how you set things up, and if it can't find /sbin/userinit, it just calls the stock init, or if something fails, it drops to a shell so you can fix things.

Too bad it's not on the Empeg distribution. That'd be nice.