Thanks for the ruling, I'd rather lose a few frames and have legal runs. I went ahead and replaced the EEPROM and it saves fine now.

Hello, I have been speedrunning on my childhood SM64 cartridge and just the other day the EEPROM chip that the game writes save data to seems to have died. The game works fine still, but I can't keep any saves, and when I select "Save & Continue" after finishing a level, it feels like it might be a hair faster than it was when I could save. My question is: does this cartridge count as illegal/modified for the purposes of speedrunning? Should I replace the EEPROM with a donor, or leave it as-is? Personally I don't mind having no saves on this cart.