Yes, I recapped the board. Measured everything out and found good continuity. Some caps I used (near the audio area) are tantalums others are the red cylindrical ones by Würth. Thanks for the hint to check the new caps for bridging something. I will definitely do that.
The diagnostic mode until now has never been working for me on any machine I tried. Maybe something I am doing generally wrong. I used ZTerm on a G3 Mac and a printer cable to connect the two modem ports (setting ZTerm up as written on the Google Doc). But never get the Asterisk back.
And I thought the PSU was the bigger challenge

At least I tested on my porch to be safe and was so glad to hear the chime.