The home 8500 has a G3 upgrade card in it.  It won't even boot into 
OF without patches, much less boot ofwboot.

A work 8500 won't boot a CD without the SystemDisk patches.  It also 
*needs* the video delay patch.  I note that SystemDisk does patch the 
xcoff loader package.

A work 7500 with 604 appears to work the same as the 8500 though the 
video delay isn't critical.

The value of load-base matters, but you seem to need to set it to 
something *other* than the load address of the xcoff image.  I'll 
need to check this a bit more.

Signature held pending an ISO 9000 compliant
signature design and approval process.
h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu