NES stopped working after homebrew game

Hello,
I just discovered a problem with my NES. I had bought and played a little bit of a Final Fantasy VII English port cartridge. It required some weird ritual with the power button to start the game. But when I try to play anything now, i just get a black screen. LED doesn't blink, and I can tell its putting through some signal because the "no signal" display on the television disappears.

All I can find (vaguely) is that this might be the same behavior that happens when the 10NES blocker chip stops a game from playing. But this is happening with every game now. Is it the 10NES chip? And if so, is there a way I can fix this?

 

Sounds like your FF7 works by knocking out the 10NES chip electrically and it may have killed it.
Not sure if you can get your NES to work again by doing the old 10NES disable mod..

 

Gotcha, thanks for the confirmation! I'll give that a shot.

 

Okay, it's worth a shot.
But be careful with the chip. Lifting an old through hole ic leg like this easily breaks it or the trace.

 

Finally got around to this, and I wish I didn't. I read a bunch of stuff that mentioned cutting the pin (ex: http://www.mmmonkey.co.uk/console/nintendo/nes-lockout.htm), and that sounded easy. But the friggin capacitors wouldn't bend out of the way enough. After nibbling at it for an hour at bad angles and getting nowhere, I thought maybe I could desolder it. I've never soldered or desoldered before, but I bought some tools for the purpose and watched some eevblog tutorials that seemed easy enough. After heating it up with desolder wick for another half hour (not continuously) at increasing temperatures, I didn't get anywhere with that either. So finally I just took a dremel to the pin. The dremel tip was just barely small enough to fit over the whole pin. It tore the pin out of the chip (I was planning on grounding the cut leg, but there was no leg left) and bit into the board a little bit. I put a small piece of electrical tape over the gap that was left, put it back together, and got no difference at all. Exact same behavior.

TL;DR, I ran out of good ideas and the bad idea didn't work. Don't be like me kids.

 

Wow, that's a dangerous cart.

 

Okay, truth be told, this is what happened to my 10NES mod as well: Leg broke off at the IC package border.
They're really fragile. Other chips take this better.
Anyway, do you get a colored screen now maybe? What do you see when you run the NES with no game (and what with a game)?

 

No colors at all. Just a black screen like before, both with a game and without a game. I do know it's sending some kind of signal though, because my TV has a "No Signal" warning when it's not getting anything. That goes off when i power on the NES (and comes back when i power it off). But, nothing else shows.

 

Doubtful it is the 10NES chip. Maybe the bootleg cart PCB connector is thicker (like the dreaded Game Genie) then standard carts over bending the Toaster pins. That or a capacitor from the power surges of tapping the power button to power mentioned in the OP.

 

Im going to guess its this. the 10NES chip was intact before I butchered it. When games didn't connect correctly, it did the flashing LED and screen colors. It's only after playing that cart where the color flashing stopped. It looked like behavior of a disabled 10NES chip, which led me to believe it possibly fried mine.
If it is this, would it be unsafe to play it on a NES with the chip already disabled? How about a NES model 2?

 

open the repo cart and post a pic

 

The 10NES chip controls the reset line. If it blew the reset line will be held low (instead of cycling on/off, which made the led blink) and there be the source of your black screen.

 

Sorry for the delay. I've tried attaching the photo from my phone, hopefully it appears here correctly.

 

It doesn't seem to be using a stun circuit. That looks like a CIClone or AVRCIC.

 

Ok. Thank you for the input! So it appears safe to continue playing then (in functional NESs)?