i spent the afternoon buzzing out the cpu tracks and testing chips with the test rom what a wasted afternoon............

Can't agree with that - the way to become a better fault finder is to do more fault finding!

I was thinking after my advise to go back with the test ROM that maybe this wasn't the highest quality advise, but at least it was cheap  .   If you can run the test modes and the game comes up in attract mode then the mpu and roms are probably all ok. Sorry about that.