hi,

>>I find that rebooting via the keyboard, which is often necessary when
>>debugging bootloaders, makes it almost impossible to have one's
>>fingers in place before the bong. On at least one occasion while
>>rebooting from OS X I held the keys down too soon and OS X hung up on
>>something. Certainly as close to the bong as possible is good advice,
>>which is what I was trying to convey.
> 
> 
> Also, I find on the G4s that holding down the keys too soon can cause
> problems, and I believe that what happens is the console video doesn't
> set up so the input-output for OF goes somewhere else. I am actually
> unable to boot into OF on my G4 from MacOS 9, and I can't auto-boot at
> all (no video output). I have to boot into OS X from MacOS 9 and then
> reboot from there. Then I can get the G4 to go into OF on the console,
> after I hear the bong.
> 
> tim

from my experience, on G3 b&w, G4 etc. (read: new world machines) oyu 
just have to pay attention to the keyboards' caps lock LED.

when (re)booting the Mac, a short flash of this LED signals that the 
machine just recognized the keyboard (well, sorry for this 
not-very-technically-speaking descrition ;). pressing alt-option-o-f 
immediately after the LED's flashing, you'll get to the OF prompt 
without any hickups ;)

HTH,

timo