In reply to:

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If the player isn't modifying anything on the OS side, then how is it setting the time for the OS when I set the time in the player settings?

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That's not modifying files (see - I was careful with my words!). The RTC, like the flash memory, is writable all the time (to a process with sufficient privilege). But remember that even though the player is showing you local time, it's talking UTC behind the scenes to the kernel. I hope this explanation makes sense.

Absolute (UTC) time is a global concept in Unix; the translation of that time to a particular time-zone is each application's responsibility (just as providing messages in the user's language is). Most applications use the library function localtime() which depends on TZ (the environment variable), so they all have the same behaviour. The player software (probably) doesn't use the environment variable, as it keeps its own time zone in persistent (but not file) storage.

I agree that it would be nice for TTS-clock to pull the player's time zone setting from flash memory (or the scratch partition?) and use that, ideally doing so each time it's used. That's what I was hinting at, at the end of my previous post. A skilled empeg hacker (i.e. not me!) might be able to reverse-engineer the player's actions in response to the user's selection of a time zone, by intercepting the right system calls, I think.