Thank you, roberts. I think I need to rig up a serial console to see what is going on.
I tried two things:
First, taking the a10Core image and swapping out the script.bin from the Miniand Hackberry as per your instructions. This did not boot, so the discrepancies between the two A10 systems exceeds the script.bin differences. Will have to watch the console.
Then, swapping two additional boot files (sunxi-spl.bin and u-boot.bin) in an approach that Miniand users made to get a Debian headless server image to boot on the Hackberry. This is the option that appeared to boot and started an SSH service, but not with the same password as the default Android system. I didn't really expect this to work, but it was easy to try.
Anyhow, off to order parts to mod my serial cables to the Hackberry connector. I am a long-time Tinycore user (but infrequent commenter) and hope to get my favorite toolkit up on this device, too.