Was in the middle of a game of Safe Cracker and the game suddenly reset. Then I could smell smoke and naturally turned off the machine. I could smell something burning and discovered smoking coming from a LM339 an opto voltage comparitor for the opto board underneath the playfield. It's on U1. I can get a new LM339 to replace the old one. But I'm wondering if a short or some other electrical issue was likely to have caused the chip to die? Or just age and fatigue. Last thing I want to do is to replace it and have this happen again and damage the board or game. Especially if someone here in the know recommends me to rule out other likely issues first.

Game had been playing fine and I haven't done any work recently on it. My son played about 15+ games the evening before with no issues at all.

In taking the board out of the game I discovered the chip not only burned, but a bit of the board as well around the chip.

Here's a few pics.

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In case I need to replace the board, I've been looking at the usual and beyond pinball parts and board dealers and have found no one that has one in stock currently.

I'm going to go take out all of the fuses on the power board and elsewhere since I just bought this game and make sure all of the correct ones are installed. Should have done this earlier.

Well I'm going to have a tech come out and see if he can find a short that caused this mess. Not sure if he'll be willing to try and fix the board or if I'll need to send it off to a board repair expert.
Just in case I've also been looking everywhere online, even putting out wanted ads, but NO ONE in the US or overseas seems to have this board in stock. Or the updated one that Great Lakes Modular sold in the past that's an updated version. Bummer!

Yup and have one on order. Am also going to try and get the original board repaired.
Now my big concern is finding the short or issue that caused the board to fry. I certainly will take into looking at what Flynnibus and Swanng suggested. Thanks for those and everyone who's responded! Obviously not a cause of just throwing in a new or fixed board w/o doing a lot of detailed work to figure out a problem with the game.
Stinks I haven't been able to play it in about 2 weeks. Just recently purchased it and only pin I've been able to get my teenage son to play in quite awhile. He loves beating the board game and winning tokens and he's won 4x's more than me! Also died just a few days before my 50th birthday, I think there's some irony there somewhere.

Discovered that the chip on a different board (the CPU) has a slightly burned IC at U23. It's IC74HC237 which I do have a replacement one at home. So more than just one board/IC involved.

"The HC237 on the MPU board is part of the switch matrix columns IIRC.
Better check out the ULN2803 just under it too."

It appears ULN2803 is burnt too.

Tech came out eliminated short, changed a fuse, new ULN2803, checked out other things with DMM and put opto board in and game is working. Wasn't as easy as I making it sound as it took awhile to eliminate various errors and things happening but bottom line is the game's working again.