There must be some way to get the hardware cursor to appear even without
booting to ethernet or the disk drive...
I do have a disk drive, controller and disk packs, but as you mentioned
it requires almost all the boards to be working, which may be very
difficult if I can't gradually get things working and tested (such as
the display board).
I have however confirmed with an o-scope that I am getting the correct
video output from the video board, so I assume that board is working
properly. Now about a dozen more boards to go!