Modifying the kernel image directly would be very difficult since the entire kernel is compressed. One way to get round this would be for someone to produce a custom kernel which read the startup logo from an area of flash outside the kernel and then write a program (based on download.c) which allowed the logo to be downloaded to this area of the flash independently.

Hmm, I wonder if you could hang some cleverness off interrupts to do animation among a number of frames until the first thing gets pushed onto the queue by the player...

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Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)