I'm aware that the later top-loader NES models are preferred for FF1 speedrunning due to their less volatile RAM at startup. Does anyone have more concrete information on specific CPU and board revisions? For example, the NESDev wiki talks about an RP2A03G CPU on the NES-CPU-07 board revision. Have hardware-based runners gone through and documented which CPU/board revisions work for FF1 speedruns, or is it still sort of trial-and-error?

I loved FF1 as a child, and having spent a couple of decades dealing with N layers of interpreted and compiled languages, am enjoying digging into the nuts and bolts of a simple architecture.