Lots to unpack here. First off, welcome to pinside! You really hit the ground running with a fantastic hard to find game.

My suggestion would be to head over to pinwiki or pinrepair and familiarize yourself with some basic pinball repair knowledge.

For starters, these Gottlieb games are known to have horrendous grounding issues. In my (limited) experience, properly grounding the games will solve many problems.

Alternatively, start super simple. Are there credits on the machine? Are there enough balls in the trough? Are the switches in the trough activating? A game won’t start if those last two conditions aren’t met.