Inherited Cube X printer troubles

So I got this printer from a friend that got it from a college that was upgrading to new 3D printers. It's a 2013 model Cube X from 3D Systems. It was gutted and rebuilt with after market parts. The controller is a Arduino MEGA 2560 and had Marlin 1.0.2 firmware.

I used the printer a few times and it worked great. I wanted to update the software because of some added features that I needed.. Wanted to get auto bed leveling which is a huge benefit to have. ordering a sensor for this.
I had spent some time making mechanical adjustments to the bed but messed up my Y homing somehow pushing buttons on the controller, but that's another issue.

I decided it was time to update the controller to 2.1.2
Something got screwed up during the software transfer and I'm in troubleshooting mode,. From what I understand there are two ways to send the software, one is via Arduino Software , and the other is using Microsofts Visual Studio.

I was using Visual studio following a Youtube tutorial closely when the file transfer completed , it said success. I looked at the machine and LCD is blank. Reboot machine, nothing on screen.

I'm thinking I might have not done something in the right order, or maybe my process is flawed.

I'm using the Arduino software right now since I am more familiar with it.

In debugging the code I got Serial Port 3 pin D14 and/or D15 conflicts with another pin on the board.

 

Fixed it!

 

Spent some time learning to navigate Visual Studio, much more functions to learn but the main issue was in the source code.

 

unfortunately, we are not up and running yet. still tweaking the configuration.h file. I learned that I can connect my board directly to my computer to run it with Pronterface. Does anyone have experience with interfacing this? it is supposed to be strait forward. I don't think my main board is compatible.