Ha ha! I cleaned it up and still the same! Which led me to checking possible noisy 5v line (no idea what I was doing!?), increasing voltages, changing PSUs, (lots of helpful advice from the legend
@channel27 
) I was at Jewson's at 8am to get contact cleaner – nothing changed but I learnt a trick from Ken irepairsega involving shorting PC62 decoupling cap to "pull voltage back up and clear content RAM"! Didn't work for me though!
Sooo... let's just do some board swapping then as first planned – I was pretty sure it was the CPU board on the original that was toast as it had three scorch-like marks on it – so was just hoping the video board was ok.
And...
DAAYTOOOOONAAAAAAH!!!! HA ha!
Had me on a crazy trip with a supposed working stack that didn't – not surprised as it had been stored in clay! – but learnt loads from this and am happy Dan
