I don't think I can 'hijack' the display when I haven't officially returned from the WAITMENU ioctl

Correct, you can't. But what you *can* do is run in overlay mode using the setgeom ioctl and reserve a little window for any output you want to do. Unfortunately this means you interfere with operation of the player depending on what buttons you're trapping, because apps that run in overlay mode still get input focus, there's no way to run multiple overlay apps.

I think once Mark's climbing season comes to an end, we'll have a very good chance of getting improvements made to the userland interface.