As others have said... intermittent faults like this are 99% of the time due to poor connections unless you have some corrosion on the board from an old battery... this gradually eats through the tracks until the game will boot no longer. My guess is connections though... chip sockets or header pins... if the logic supply is not solid, it will drop out and the game will freeze up like this.
It may boot now but if the fault isnt fixed then it will crash during a game
