It’s a Korg DS-8. Pretty fancy for the late 1980’s. I did some reading at it became clear that it needed a new backup battery installed. The voices were all weird or missing and the LCD was displaying garbage characters. A factory reset restored one piano voice, but in order to load new patches (voices, instruments, whatever) I needed to replace the battery. I downloaded the user manual and the service manual.
Joystick!
You basically remove all the screws and the bottom comes off. It has to hang over the edge of the table so the joystick doesn’t get stressed.
Korg.
A soldered in CR2032 3V lithium battery. 
FYI, you can’t solder tabs onto a lithium battery…these are spot welded. You can buy replacement batteries but I wanted to get it running ASAP.
I used my Hakko desoldering tool to remove the old battery.
While the desoldering tool was warm I removed the CR2032 coin cell holders from some dead PC motherboards I had laying around. Then I made some leads. 
Soldered in the holder. Now the next guy needing to replace the battery can just snap one in. You can buy the holders but why not recycle? Coincidentally my friend Kent had the soldered in battery on his CNC mill motherboard (a 486 processor DOS based Centroid PC control…) fail this week, wiping his incredibly specific BIOS. I gave him one of the holders and he was back in business as well, although we did have to find out a bunch of detail about the hard drive, including the Landing Zone specification in order for the motherboard to see the drive.
The power cord was missing, I didn’t have an exact match so I made do with some large spade crimps that fit.
I had this USB MIDI cable on hand and tried to use it to upload some factory patches (Sysex files!) using both MidiOx and Bome’s SendSx. But it just wouldn’t work. I could play individual notes from the PC and I could retrieve data from the keyboard but it just wouldn’t work for sending data. Much Googling found some various forum threads that said that you need a better quality interface. 
In what was my second ever Craigslist purchase, I found a nice guy selling an M-Audio MIDISport 2x2
USB interface for about half of new price. A quick trip to town and I was in business. I forget which of the two programs I ended up using to upload the file, but it succeeded and I now have all the factory patches installed. 
Now if only I had some musical ability…
15 comments:
hi, i'm from indonesia. got same problem here. don't know how to upload sysex data to ds-8 using mac. hope you can help. thank you.
I don't have a Mac, but a google search for:
sysex mac midi
Turns up a bunch of apps that you would presumably use with a USB/MIDI interface.
On the battery holder, is the negative two-pronged, and the positive one-pronged, or vice versa?
The pictures show it, but I checked, two prongs positive.
Nick
Hi, Nick.
I just replaced the DS-8 battery; thanks for the instructions! However, it is a real challenge trying to do a sysex dump into it to restore the sounds. I find the owner's manual very unhelpful. I have turned on sysex reception with Function 8. Then when I try to send the data, nothing seems to happen. Is there anything else I need to do to prepare the DS-8 to receive sysex? Does the DS-8 display anything showing that it is receiving correctly? Thanks for any help!
There's a memory protect function, Job #4, that needs to be turned off I think. Beyond that, what sort of MIDI peripheral are you using? The cheap imported ones do not work well for sysex messages. How are you sending the sysex?
Nick
Further to that, is the DS-8 receiving notes from your MIDI connection?
Thanks for the reminder on memory protect. I think when I did the power-on reset, it went back to memory protect on. I am now able to upload a sysex file, but there seems to be a transmission problem (nonsensical file names, some patches sound OK, others just a click). I'm using a good MIDI interface (ESI M4U XT) with Bome SendSX. Do you need to slow down MIDI transmission or do any other tricks? I'll try using a different computer/interface as well to see if that helps.
I don't remember anything about slowing down, so I'm not much help. It's possible the patches are bad? As with everything, just keep screwing with it and I'm sure you'll get there. Try MidiOx and also check out CTRLR, which has a DS-8 "panel" for directly controlling the parameters and moving around patches.
http://ctrlr.org/
Nick
Persistence pays off! Tried with a newer laptop, and the transfer was successful! I think my older laptop didn't supply the interface (USB powered) with enough juice to work properly.
Thanks for the CTRLR tip, will check it out!
When you say take all of the screws off, what does that mean? I've taken all of the screws off and the bottom cover won't come off. I haven't taken off the smaller screws around the midi connector etc.
Not sure if you're still checking this post at all but.....
I have a Korg DS-8 and I pulled it out the other day and just noticed that all the sounds are gone. A Factory reset gave me one sound and the rest are squeaks. Assuming the internal battery went. I understand most of the stuff except did you upload all the factory files you linked or just certain ones?
You just want want stock.zip, if my dim memory serves.
Nick
Thanks for all the help. I got my Korg DS-8 working again. I soldered a battery button holder in...what a pain. Got myself an M-Audio 2x2 for cheap. AT first I didin't think the M-audio was working. One of my pitfalls initially was not installing the drivers for the M-Audio.Once i did that the M-audio came to life. Having a older Mac and Laptop I was able to install the driver. No Drivers for Mac Catalina. I was able to use Sysex Librarian to send the stock files back to my Korg.
Now the next question...how long before that C2023 battery dies again? lol
Cómo reseteo el ds 8.... cualquier ayuda sería genial
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