I finally got it working and flashed back to DD-WRT.
There probably isn't many people tinkering with such an old router, but just in case the solution was to open a serial connection, plug router in and Ctrl+C to get to the CFE prompt.
Then enter these 2 commands nvram set boot_wait=on and nvram commit.
Router became pingable and I finally got a ttl=100 and was able to tftp dd-wrt.
thanks