after tinkering and remembering why i moved away from the 4550 (LCD problems)
I got the card to initialise in both software and hardware mode on the 4550...

I'm wondering if the 46K22 is too fast at 64MHZ? simple answer is to slow it down in the config...

I have noticed on the 4550 the SPI LED pullups behave completely diferently between softwar and hardware modes...