Inside a mesa virtual appliance

Dynamic analysis
you can also mount boot partition #1 and edit boot/grub/menu.lst to remove 'quiet' option (not very exiting through)
to see the grub menu switch the order of serial in console on the terminal --timeout line in /boot/grub/menu.lst

/etc/settings.sys set sys.cli.testmode = 1 to use mesa cli test mode. Not sure what it actually does, but the prompt changes to TEST

Static review
Inside the ISO you can find the pkg that contains root.cgz which you can extract with

mv rootfs.cgz rootfs.gz
gunzip rootfs.gz
cpio -idm --no-absolute-filenames rootfs

mesa stuff is under /usr/sbin