Except you still wouldn't get on-screen feedback of what you were doing in the menus. You couldn't, for example, adjust the settings in the Sound menu with that display. It only takes the song info from the serial port and runs it through a video character generator.

I played around for a while with trying to determine where you are in the menus by monitoring the button/remote codes in the kernel, i.e. by dead reckoning. In theory, this would allow you to construct your own versions of the menus with external logic. Unfortunately, it turned out to be difficult - the behaviour of the menus seems to depend on the timing of the button presses. E.g. turning the knob quickly results in the menus skipping ahead more positions that the number of codes passing through the kernel.

Borislav