Anyone have any ideas for singling out faulty rom chips. Maybe a corrupter on one rom at a time and then loading into mame to see if the results are similar?
A ROM corrupting tool is just that, it wrecks the data in a ROM. It's for experiments and hacking.
I suppose you could try doing that, but it's not reliable. Most people will tell you to use a logic probe to look for stuck address/data lines, or otherwise oddly acting ROM chips.
I take my logic probe tip and use it to short 2 lines of the ROMs momentarily to see what changes on the screen. That allows you to ID background, player sprites, and overlay (text/scores/health) ROMs quickly.
Oh, and if you hit audio samples they will sound like shit and finding program ROMs will cause the game to lock up or reboot.