Quote Originally Posted by sidnotcrazy View Post
Speaking from personal experience, I have played Camerica games on my top loader, and had no problems whatsoever.
You have no problems on your top loader because the top loader is devoid of the 10NES lockout chip. I can't remember off hand what the switch on the cartridges did exactly but the OP is on the right track, it allows two slightly different attempts at overriding the 10NES chip. If I remember correctly, awhile back I read that Color Dreams sent +5v to a specifc pin on the 10NES chip (or something similar) to tie it up so it wouldn't check to see if there was a matching chip in the cartridge. (That's how the 10NES works, it compares data with a similar chip in a licensed cartridge.) This allowed the unlicensed code to run and by the time the 10NES chip was set free, the game was already running and it had nothing more to do.

All unlicensed NES games use some form to 10NES override except for the unlicensed Tengen games which use an illegally engineered 10NES clone (the Rabbit chip) - one of the reasons unlicensed Tengen games function exactly like a licensed title.