What does the LED on the MPU do?
The round pin headers on an NVRAM are wider than the flat pins on a normal RAM. If your IC socket was questionable to begin with, probably from corrosion, the NVRAM round pins can break the contacts single leaf RN sockets used on a 6803 board.
The 6803 boards are pretty finicky themselves, just messing with the board may have caused a physical connection issue. The game has a power on self test... use that info.