Ah, yeah, that is probably what he meant. I still prefer the real thing 100 times over to emulation, though. Never quite the same playing those old games on a PC.
You actually never had to blow in them, just stupid kids thought you did. It was a matter of getting the connectors lined up right because of the crappy connectors Nintendo originally used in the front loader units. You could have skipped the violently blowing into the cartridge step and got the same results from just removing and replacing the cartridge a few times.
Dropping $10 or so online for a new higher quality connector will fix the problem.