I got a bit frustrated in the randomness of booting games so I decided to look a bit more into this: I started separating more pins (with a few good guesses from the page above) until the n64 would boot games reliably. I found out that pins 1 and 13 were required to be separatated (in addition to the previous ones, which I also tried to combine too see if it was necessary).
Now the mod seems to work without any issues, but in my case it required 9 switches

(pins 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 15, 19, 28) instead of the 5 which the original author claimed