TronXY X5SA Klipper woes

Printer X5SA
Board: cxy-v6-191017
Original firmware: Marlin v1.31
Flashed to: Marlin v1.32
printer.cfg using (Github) - verified the serial is set correctly

A) (M v1.31) compiled klipper, put klipper.bin in bare sd card, inserted and powered up. No effect
B) - renamed the file update.bin on a bare card
C) - made an update.cbd version of the file, put it on the card and powered it up - no change.

~received new firmware from TronXY~
Flashed new firmware to v1.32... then:

D) using the existing firmware folder structure as supplied by TronXY with the new Marlin firmware, copied it over to the SD card. I copied klipper.bin onto the card, swapped the names of klipper.bin with fmw_x5sa_nt.bin, powered it up - it loads all of the files, stalling on the last file (which I understand is normal). Removed the card, restarted the machine - no beeps, just get an "initializing" message.

E) using the wiki instructions, followed all of the steps - flashing old firmware, creating a new cbd file, putting it on the card and powering up the machine. This time the machine beeps a little tune and where I was getting the display issues. As it was beeping, I looked at Mainsail and saw it starting to load the page as if it were connected only to drop 5 seconds later back to an error.

@JRud52 thread in the Discord channel about a week ago with the exact same issue I have with Marlin (z-offset dropping), same issues flashing Klipper - he was able to flash the old firmware and use the older, wiki process eventually - which is what led me back to trying to use the update.cbd process

I've re-compiled klipper multiple times, verified each setting line by line each time. I'm really good at swapping jumpers and pushing firmware to the board via STCP - just not so good at getting klipper to work.

Additional note - the old firmware appears to be an all-in-one solution. You push up the firmware and then do an update (which doesn't work for me). The newer firmware they send, you push a bootloader to the board. When the bootloader runs, it appears to look at a file in the /Tronxy called sd_guide.bin.

The sd_guide.bin file looks like it has wildcards for filename prefixes to load. This leads me to believe the steps of renaming klipper.bin to fmw_x5sa_nt.bin is the most-likely "good" route - but does not work for whatever reason.