Okay.. All parts are in for the PCB. So now I'll use that perfboard idea to put it all together and take a stab at it.
The VFD is here too, and that thing is TINY. I mean the visible display area is LESS than the width of my finger. Entire board, less than two fingers..
I can't do anything hardware wise until mid-next week, so I'm spending some time right now, looking into the programming side...

Having only done simple C programming before, I was rather pleased to have my first test program (all it did was print "Test!" to the screen) compile and run on the empeg. Whohoo.

Now I need to figure out how I'm going to obtain status of the player. (Playing status? (Play, Pause, Off?) Song Info? (Artist, Title, Source?) Other Info? (When do we hit a new song? Is the user in a menu?)

I'm starting to poke around other programs out there, mostly the lyrics viewer thing.. so all I gotta do now is trial and error.

I love this stuff.
Me.