I always had in mind to port it to the Empeg. And I've spent the last week and a half with final success. Right now it can run without any interface and play both mp3's and ogg's. I'm going to be working on the interface next.

Awesome. Sounds pretty cool.

Oh, and excuse me if I'm stepping on anyone by wanting to replace the player. There are only two things that I have problems with the original player (and otherwise it is very very nice). One is the lack of OGG support. The second is the use of that annoying database, and the lack of good automatic song picking (I am not a fan of playlists).

I think most would agree that competition is a great thing, especially when it's open source!

Do keep in mind though, that there is a version 3 of the software that does play OGGs that is now in the alpha stages, although we may not see it beta for another three to six months (my estimation) due to the other (real, commercial) product obligations. With regard to the database, it seems rather necessary in some form to allow the very cool (IMHO) search functionality. But I haven't yet seen what you envision by "automatic song picking" either.

If you have not already, you might want to look at another attempt at a 3rd party player that has been worked on in the past called Rioplay. I'm not very familiar with it but maybe you could get some insight from it's author (grgcombs) at least in terms of obstacles overcome and experience gained. I don't believe he's released his source, but it might be worth asking nicely to see if you could look through it.

Though I haven't found any code for rendering text, but I haven't looked hard

Richard Kirby (kirkis) has written a nice graphics library called vfdlib for this. Try a BBS search and check out here.

I'll let others comment on their respective areas of knowledge, but that should at least give you some search terms to start with. Good luck!

John