It took some effort, but I figured it out. It is sometimes hard to tell if something is wrong, or if I am just doing it wrong. In this case, I wasn't loading the modules properly and so I thought that the kernel configuration option was somehow causing an unknown symbol.
I proved my error:
1) Boot from standard microcore_2.1
2) Copy all of the modules (I accidentally left some out before) into /lib/modules/2.6.29.1-tinycore/kernel/drivers:
message/fusion/mptbase
message/fusion/mptfc
message/fusion/mptsas
message/fusion/mptscsih
message/fusion/mptspi
scsi/scsi_transport_fc
scsi/scsi_transport_sas
scsi/scsi_transport_spi
3) depmod -a
4) modprobe mptspi (I wasn't loading the right one at first)
My apologies, I usually make really certain I understand the problem before I post so I don't sound stupid. This was an exception. Thanks for the patience.
I'll put these and the BusLogic module together into a small extension for 2.x VMware users.