I don't have a heat pencil, so it's quite hard to remove SMD chips with just a soldering iron.
If you get current/short issues with the display connected, you likely have the cable wired wrong, or the display itself is shorted, or more likely, the inverter itself.
The problem lies in the display cable, I haven't made the inverter cable yet.
At this point I am thinking about getting a regular video cable (If it is possible to obtain one) and making the inverter cable, since they have nothing in common.
Because the system powers on completely only for a couple of seconds (and then it powers down again), it's quite hard to check if a chip is bad.
I kept powering on, unplugging the power cable, plugging it back and powering on again for 5 minutes , then I took a thermal picture using my Flir One thermal camera:
The only components that got slightly hotter than the rest are a those three TO220s and the sound chips.
The temperature range shown in the picture is from 23.7 °C to 32.0 °C.
The setup was very straightforward:
(in this picture the keyboard was moved to the other connector just for convenience. it doesn't matter where i plug it in)
no cards connected, just power, keyboard and speakers. The problem is still the same. sometimes it chimes, and the a couple of seconds later it turns off. doesn't matter if you press one of the keys again or if you press the restart/NMI switches, it stays off. You have to unplug the power and then plug it back in.
this works if you only give power to one side of the connector (ground seems to be in common), if you apply power to both or only to the other one, the system will show no signs of life.
is it possible to have a simple pinout of that connector? when i connect the plug from the case (the one that goes to the main battery and to the 9V one) the voltage on both red cables is the same: 6.5V when the safety switch is pressed and 9V when is depressed (while using a 9V battery and mu bench power supply hooked up to the main battery terminals