marvelus10 wrote:
How detrimental is it to bend pin 28 on your RAM and connect + of the battery, and - to ground pin 14.
There's no detrimental effect I guess in regards to damage, except you'll loose your save pretty quickly. You basically hardwired the WRAM to *ONLY* be powered off the battery. So when you're playing the game the chip's power is ALWAYS coming from the battery. Normally the NES supplies power to the WRAM when the game is running. So you're rapidly discharging the battery and it will only last for maybe 100 hours of game play I'm guessing. I could do the math but it isn't long. It's obviously not a good solution at all. It is okay as a temporary power supply if you're removing the chip from the PCB and you don't want to loose the data I guess. You still have to make sure you're biasing CE and/or /CE properly and I'm guessing you're not. So you're still at high risk of losing your data before the battery even dies...
Long story short: Don't do what you did...
EDIT: It might help to understand why this is exactly. Basically the chip consumes VERY LITTLE power when it's not operating that's why a battery can be used to save data for 20+ years, it only requires a tiny trickle of current to save the data. BUT, when the chip is operating (playing on the NES) the power consumed is 1000's of times larger than when shutdown. The battery can't support this much current for very long. So you're quickly discharging the battery anytime you play.