I know how you feel. I had a sound issue with my joust and it started rebooting itself.
I got it to work, except it still had this sound issue, by replacing the ram chips.
I got it to work pretty good and I had a couple left so I sez to meself, let's just go ahead and put these other two in..
I managed to get distracted, the #@@#! wouldn't go in easy, and I managed to get it in, but backwards.
When the machine fired, it didn't do anything. It booted and then shutdown, etc. Little led flashed and went out.
Well, I found the backward chip and went to pull it out, and buddy it was hot.
I managed to get it to come back up, but now there's no sound. I'll have to replace all the freaking ram again. I always get it from Bob Roberts. I'm just going to replace all 24 ram chips like he told me the first time.
But if you try and fail, there's a guy on ebay that fixes them with great feedback -
LinkYou're out about $125.
I have a defender board I don't plan on fixing if that's a help. I robbed some chips off of it, and it would be good for parts. PM me if your interested, I'll let it go to a collector. I will send you a pic if you want to make sure it has the chip, I can't remember offhand if it has all of the rom chips in it.