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If Neil ever opened the source to this NES software it wouldn't be very hard to add support for MIDI sync via FamiiDI or a similar arduino-based device.

What OS are you on? If you're using Windows, Notepad++ is a good, light editor.

Don't worry, it'll be just as easy. Each controller has three bytes of memory defined as labels; NewButtons, OldButtons & JustPressed for controller 1 and NewButtons2, OldButtons2 & JustPressed2 for controller 2. Each controller is done the same way, however, so I'll explain it for a single controller first.

NewButtons = $41
OldButtons = $42
JustPressed = $43
NewButtons2 = $46
OldButtons2 = $47
JustPressed2 = $48

The very first thing he does in the controller_test routine is to copy NewButtons over to OldButtons. This happens each time at the very start of the routine - before polling for new values from the controller - because OldButtons represents the buttons pressed last time the routine was checked.

controller_test:

        LDA NewButtons
    STA OldButtons

Next, he polls the first controller 8 times to get each serial bit and stores all 8 bits as a single byte in NewButtons. He does the same for the second controller and calls it "NewButtons2". (This is what my example above shows; I poll each controller 8 times and store those values in memory locations labeled con1Buttons, con2Buttons, con3Buttons, and con4Buttons.)

ConLoop:
    LDA $4016
    LSR
    ROR NewButtons
        INX
        CPX #$08
        bne ConLoop

He then takes the values from OldButtons, inverts them, and does a logical AND operation with NewButtons. This produces a value - stored at JustPressed - that shows only buttons that have been pressed since the last time the routine was run.

    LDA OldButtons
    EOR #$FF
    AND NewButtons
    STA JustPressed

Finally, it applies a bitmask to this JustPressed  value and checks each bit individually to see if the corresponding button has been pressed. If it has been pressed then execution will fall through to the "do stuff here" area, otherwise it will jump to the next check.

CheckRight:
    LDA #%10000000
    AND JustPressed
    BEQ CheckDown

           ; Do stuff here

CheckDown;

If you look at the code and compare the code for the first and second controllers you'll realize it's identical. So, to adding polling for 2 more controllers you just need to duplicate all that twice more. Obviously, you'll need to define 6 more bytes in memory, for example:

NewButtons3 = $58
OldButtons3 = $58
JustPressed3 = $5a
NewButtons4 = $5b
OldButtons4 = $5c
JustPressed4 = $5d

And you'll need to initialize each OldButtonX at the start of the controller_test routine:

controller_test:

        LDA NewButtons
    STA OldButtons

        LDA NewButtons2
    STA OldButtons2

        LDA NewButtons3
    STA OldButtons3

        LDA NewButtons4
    STA OldButtons4

Etc, etc.

Well, for me the only way to get it to sync was to switch LSDJ sync off, start the song manually, then start the sync source, then switch LSDJ to slave sync (at which point I couldn't stop the song without going through that again). This would keep the tempo in step but it was difficult or impossible to keep the actually bars synced up properly.

I was told this was not defective behaviour, that it was working as expected and that LSDJ wasn't ever tested. He even delisted LSDJ support on the product page soon after.

EDIT: What version of LSDJ were you using? Perhaps it really does work on certain versions.

That seems insanely expensive. As I mentioned in my post, you could grab an inexpensive USB-MIDI adaptor and plug it into a raspi for the same effect and save a lot of money.

I had serious trouble ever getting the nanoloop usb-midi device working with LSDJ, btw. I tried to troubleshoot it with Wittchow but it seems to not function for sync with newer versions of LSDJ. Perhaps a very old version would work.

A friend needed help with the hexadecimal required for panning, so I made this image to quickly explain how it works and to use as a reference: