Ok, made some progress. I tried every combination of memory chips (including a new set of 8 I just ordered. Still got varying degrees of garbage on the screen.
I was pushing on the memory chips and the behavior changed. Given I’ve put DeOxit on the sockets and seated and re-seated the memory chips I started thinking either bad sockets of broken traces. I couldn’t see the traces under the solid sockets, so I decided it was best to remove the sockets. As I was removing the sockets, one of them came off with one of the pins left stuck in the board. I’m guessing that socket pin was making inconsistent contact (maybe some others as well?) so I reinstalled sockets, loaded up the new memory chips I got, and I got it to boot to the ] prompt, which is awesome!
Now, I was trying to load software. Given I fried the floppy drive card, I tried using audio from asciiexpress.net to load software. When doing so, I type LOAD, press enter, and then play the audio from the site. It seems to load for a few seconds, then it beeps and drops into what I believe to be the debugger?
It shows
0008- A=FF X=9D Y=02 P=B4 S=F2
*-
Is it bad audio from my phone? Some other issues?
Thanks for all the help everyone!