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So Very Cool! great work

Ya know, like two weeks ago I was shopping my fav source for stuff (thrift store) and came on a RC toy, Sonic on a skate board. Really kick'n myself, would have made a great enclosure for the interface.

Wow Batsly Adams, very cool to hear that this hasn't died. Midi NES control has been a 'dream' of mine for so very long. Looking forward to your latest release!! Thank you!!

Oh no!
Your jumper description is correct. So considering that you are are using Famicom HW and following ne7's guide, it should work; the NTRQ mod seems the easiest of the two.  The only advice I can offer is general tips:

1.Clean the board, removing any flux.  I use rubbing alcohol, 90% grade. Did the cart work before the mod? Clean the card edge contacts, they can never be too clean.

2. Recheck you work. Verify all the wiring, more then once I have made a bone headed mistake swapping connections. Wiggle the wires a little, could be a broken wire at the place you stripped it. Don't trust yourself, VERIFY EVERYTHING

3. Use a magnifying glass and look for solder bridges and shorts. Clean up with solder braid.
Are any board traces damaged? De-soldering can be ruff on circuit boards, excess heat can lift or break a trace. If this is the case, you can carefully repair it with some 30 gauge wire. Follow the bad trace a little ways back, to a good place to solder. Clean the solder mask off and tack the wire to that spot . Connect the other end to the component.

4. Cold solder joints can 'look' OK, but still not work. Some times you can tell because they are dull and do not 'flow' to the soldered parts. You can try testing the continuity with an ohm meter. Probe on either side of the joint, I.E. from the copper on the board to the component lead; so you are testing through the solder joint. 0 ohms=GOOD. The short cut is to assume there is a cold joint and go back re-heating all the joints, use solder braid to remove the bulk of the old solder, use new flux and if needed a bit more solder. Then goto to step 1.

5. If all of the above fails, then you need to consider that the EPROM wasn't programmed correct. In which case you are back to square one, so this is a last ditch effort. Do make sure that all the above steps check out before starting over!

With all of the above, you can pop the cart back into the Famicom and try it as you go. With a large project, I like to do these checks as I go, after a build session. Troubleshooting a whole board with >100 solder points can be a night mare

With PR8 there is an issue with the save state in the ram having bad data at first boot, but I don't think this is the case with NTRQ

I'll gather the info and post to this thread soon, have to look over your photos closely.

Not to worry, you'll get it tracked down, just takes a little time!

Yea, that was part of the problem I was having at first, Just having one SMS cart and the one GameGear, you just can't narrow things down . No "known good" so to speak.
Of course there still is a possibility that I have 2 bad SMS Carts, but the odds are against that

EDIT- To your point LittleScale, there is enough room in the case for an EPROM, but access to the solder points on the mobo would be a problem. The easiest  would be at the cart connector, but would have to get at the 'back' side, that faces the LCD and run the wires to the top side without damage to the LCD wiring. Or remove the cart connector all together and wire from there, but would have to move the LCD out of position during that work also. On the other hand, don't really need the LCD for this app, so I'll take a closer look at a mod like that -EDIT

I did see a GG Dev cart at SMSPower that added jumpers from a GG cart, to a outboard EEPROM dip socket board. Seemed like a easy enough process. The GG cart being all SMD, makes it hard to use dip chips.

I was planning to follow that guide for my trouble shooting on the GearMaster (which is basically the same thing). In the end, once I get things working with the GearMaster, I'll build up the 'homebrew cart'. Seeing as I ended up getting a second GG. Stereo!!

@ Saskrotch. I haven't modded the SMS carts yet, wanted to verify everything works with stock parts first. But yea good point. The weird thing is: with the GG cart you get a 'Lic' screen then it blanks, half a sec later the 'SEGA' and the game starts. With the adapter and SMS carts, you get the 'lic' screen, blanks like normal, then nothing. But the text is different, a little larger font. As far as I can tell there isn't a bios in either GG, so is the 'Lic' text being read off the ROM?  If so, then I feel like there is an issue with the 'GG or SMS mode' contact pinning in the GearMaster. Not sure of how the code is laid out between the two carts, guessing that the processor is not jumping to the correct init vector in the SMS cart if its in 'GG mode'?!? 

Anyway, it's got to be fairly simple. The GearMaster is just ribbon cable between a SMS cart connector and a GG connector contact board. Either there is a wiring problem or its not making contact somewhere. Just have to sit down with the interconnect drawing and test

Well after finishing the re-capping, The GG still wouldn't load a SMS cart.. So after trolling Ebay again, another GG with screen problems (but not too bad) came with a Sonic cart; got another SMS cart also, Thunder Blades ( has a larger 832011 ROM, 32 pin. But the board will accommodate a 27256 just fine!). The good news is the re-capping worked wonders, the sound out is working great!
So I confirmed that both GGs boot fine with the Sonic GG cart and neither boot with either SMS cart! X(  SO, the GearMaster is @ fault!! In a sealed package when my son got it for me;  WTF?!?
I'll have to test it. I'm guessing there may be a problem with the GG/SMS pin looping, remember reading 'bout an issue like that. Or there could be a connection issue. Not much else going on inside it. We'll see.