Instead of calculating CRC16 I was hoping to be able to skip all that, and I found some bits that seem to do exactly that. Byte at file offset 0xC3 normally is 03. When I set this to 01 or 02, the terminal seems to ignore the CRC at offset 0xCC entirely.

At this junction, I'm looking at writing a script in python to convert BCS into the file format that the NCD can boot. The differences seem to be that the header length is somewhat larger on the ncd. Binutils plus this script should allow me to produce executables that can boot.

Although very slow, I am happy that I'm making some progress.