psylens

Hi. I recently ordered parts from Smash's shop to build a MidiBoxSID. This is my first electronics project and i'm pretty lost. I have spent more than 8 hours looking thru documentation and forum posts. All information i have found seems to assume some level of electronics understanding I don't have. I have soldered roughly half of the components to the board; Resistors (figured out how to identify them on my own) and jumpers (or whatever the J__ things are called) and the IC sockets - i have found the following links the most helpful: http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/midibox_sid http://www.ucapps.de/midibox_sid_walkthrough.html http://www.avishowtech.com/mbhp/mbhp_coreR4d.html Unfortunately the core module guide http://www.ucapps.de/mbhp_core.html is of little use, as it's outdated (older board design), and basically skips from soldering a couple resistors and IC sockets to a pretty much finished board. I need a bit more information in order to continue. I was hoping someone could help either give brief explanations, or point me to more informative links. A step by step of each part and it's function and relation to other parts would be ideal, however whatever you can show me would be wonderful. Question 1: I need help with placement and orientation. I don't know how a capacitor, transistor, or Quartz thingy should be soldered to the board - i'm assuming the position or direction matters. C5 indicates polarity but the rest don't. T1 indicates 'E B C' on the board, but i don't know what those correspond to and how to identify them on the transistor. Also, the midi ports have 7 pins, but there are 12 holes on the board... i have no clue what the other 5 holes are for. Question 2: How can i test my parts - my dogs got into the kit and chewed up a good number of parts - i'd like to test them to see if they still function properly. The capacitors are what i'm mostly concerned about - a couple look "squished". The resisotors, IC sockets, jumpers, etc look ok. Thanks for your time, .jt