I did try to get in touch with the author of this excellent hack, but it seems like his website was pretty abandoned last I checked.

An interesting thing to note is that this works on certain NES systems but not others, presumably based on HW revision or something. And it is consistent. So if it is caused by not initiliizing certain RAM locations, the power-on or reset RAM contents in question are consistent for a particular HW revision...

For my project, I just tried about 5 NES systems and it worked on 2 of them.