Basically the game uses two low powered coil transistors from the driver board to drive a clock and data line which goes to the chase board which in turn drives the topper lamp boards.

Unfortunately something during the design process got messed up and the lamps are actually wired up in the wrong order. It's possible they didn't know until they got the final foils in and by that time, it was just easier to fix it in software rather than redoing the wiring harnesses. The result is that the game has to write the data for all 16 lamps all at once and then re-write the data all over in order to "advance" the pattern.

Because of this, and because of latency in the game code, it's not a clean clock/data arrangement, but it is still nothing more than an on/off signal from the driver board. Not sure how an aftermarket driver board could mess that up, but...

The 194 lamps should survive a steady ON signal (such as in the topper test mode), so burning them out during normal operation shouldn't happen. If I were to just make a stab at what could be wrong, I'd say you have a bad solder joint on one (or both) of the bridge rectifiers on the chase board or there's too much voltage there, or something. Check that part out very thoroughly.