Guardians / Denjinmakai II repair log

Received today from Germany this Guardians PCB, also known as Denjinmakai II, a horizontally-scrolling beat-em-up released by Banpresto in 1995)

According to the owner the game played totally ‘bind’.I could confirm it as soon as I powered the board up :

But, as you can see from above video, I was able to restore some graphics by pressing down this surface mounted custom ASIC (QFP 208 pins)

Judging from the heatsink on its top this custom ASIC acts as a GPU generating most of the graphics and video signals too.At a closer inspection I found many lifted pins on all four sides.An example :

I promptly reflowed the IC, this gave me a steady picture but all the graphics were scrambled and, judging from the blueish screen, the RED color was missing too :

Looking at solder side of the PCB I noticed a long and quite deep scratch passing across some traces:

Inspecting the area with a microscope and doing a continuity check with my multimeter confirmed that some traces were severed and other caused unstable contact:

I patched and reinforced the traces with some AWG30 wire :

This lead to few improvements, graphics were still scrambled so I moved on to troubleshoot the lack of RED color.This was pretty easy to fix as the board had a quite clear damage that broke the trace which carries the signal to JAMMA edge connector :

As for bad graphics, I decided to double-check the previously reflowed custom ASIC and found a solder bridge shorting two pins:

Removing it fixed the issue and board completely.Repair accomplished.