How did you do this patch for 1.03 back then? I seem to recall it had something to do with the partially linked binary of the player itself. Or am I confusing something here?

No, it was a kernel patch only. It tapped into a bunch of different drivers:

- the power driver, to figure out if we in the car
- the state driver, to read the last info setting
- the display driver, to figure out when the player has started up
- the input driver, to feed initial button codes to the player

Regardless of the initial info setting, the kernel patch changes it to
'info track' (when in the car). Then it starts waiting for the player to
start, looking for the big horizontal line in the 'info track' mode (on
each screen update in the display driver). When it sees that line, it sticks
a few button presses in the buffer of the input driver.

This is from memory, let me know if you need more details and I'll look at the
patch. I haven't looked at the 2.0 kernels at all, some things have probably
changed since 1.03.

Borislav