Liontamer, weren't any of the games on your NES pirate multi-cart hacks? That seems a little surprising to me. I read an article on overseas piracy awhile ago. There's an N64 device that loads an entire N64 game off a CD into RAM (so there's a huge initial load time, but no subsequent ones) and CDs come with maybe 20 N64 games to a disk.... BUT many of those "20" games may be duplicates, so you might get a disk with 3 copies of Zelda 64 on it. I thought I remembered reading that when NES multicarts did that, the duplicates were often hacked.
I LOOOOOOVE Flying Omelette!