OK so live and learn and read the post more thoroughly, I found the above was generating log errors and not very practical having to open a connection to the database just to utilize the newer MySQLi equivalent functions it was an experiment. I wound up changing the MySQL statements to $db->prepare_input as indicated above by Lat9 and this seems to be working much better and not generating any log errors.
My question now is does this still give you the same level of protection from things like SQL injection etc as the old mysql_escape_string() depreciated functions did?
attached is the fully modified and working test version using ($db->prepare_input) instead with zencart 1.5.5e and php 7.0
Bookmarks