OK, so the player responds to buttons presses - good. The disk makes noises when you press buttons - good. Does sound like a broken display (driver circuitry, cable connection or actual glass display). And in that case your best bet is contacting carsupport@empeg.com.

Do you have anything to hook up the home RCA outputs to? If so hook it up and then press the down button 3 times. If you succeeded in uploading music (emplode did find the player and syncing gave no error messages?) then you should start playing. You might have to turn up the volume as I think it comes set to lowest possible...

/Michael