Thanks for the quick reply! I'm still incredibly new and mostly just trying to get a basic tool chain running. You nailed it with $212C guess (still haven't dug into what it really is yet though). In their init code (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Super_NES_Programming/Initialization_Tutorial/Snes...) they used sta instead stz (forgive me not knowing the exact differences yet, I haven't done asm since college) and a discussion page found that changing it made it work with a different emulator and now it works for me with both bsnes and Mesen-S! Great hint!
I've joined the discord and I'm going to check out the tutorials you recommended. It's a shame that there is faulty info out there. Thanks again, I really appreciate it!