Upgrading/replacing the Kronos motherboard

pete.m · Post by **pete.m** » Sun Jun 02, 2024 9:20 am

Korg no longer supports the Kronos in the way they used to, and a couple of users have recently highlighted the impossibility of getting hold of replacement motherboards directly from Korg.

There are, however, quite a few instances of users replacing the original motherboards with generic replacements - not necessarily because the original board has stopped working, but in order to improve performance.

I've started this post in order to encourage forum users to share any technical information or practical tips they have, in order to help people to find a solution if their motherboards happen to fail at some future date.

To start things off, here's a Youtube video from somebody who did it. It doesn't show the work he did, but just gives an overview of how it worked out. He mentions in one of his comments that he subsequently replaced the board in his Kronos 2, as well as his Kronos X. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKCTpfgH3dA

Here's a link to a post detailing the actual work involved, written by the guy whose method the person on Youtube followed - https://marcan.st/2016/06/hacking-and-u ... rg-kronos/

timg11 · Post by **timg11** » Tue Jun 11, 2024 9:42 pm

@pete.m, I was very interested in the potential to increase polyphony when these blogs first came out. You can see I'm not afraid to dig into a Kronos.

I imaged my Kronos SSD drive to give me one to experiment with. I started following the preparatory steps, and before I got too far, my results differed from what was in Hector's (aka marcan) post, and I could go no further. I asked questions by email, but never received response so I abandoned the effort. (I'm competent working in Linux environments, but Hector is clearly a skilled developer with knowledge far beyond mine) So far, my original motherboards are working fine, so there is no urgency, but I can see this will become critical in the future.

I'd love to learn about the "quite a few instances of users replacing the original motherboards... to improve performance"!
AFAIK, there were exactly two. Hector and before that Heider. If anyone else has had success with a motherboard upgrade following these processes, please let us know.

average_male · Post by **average_male** » Fri Jun 14, 2024 1:14 am

timg11 wrote:You can see I'm not afraid to dig into a Kronos.

Why you no share video link?, says private and only cool people may view it.

timg11 · Post by **timg11** » Fri Jun 14, 2024 1:25 pm

average_male wrote:
timg11 wrote:You can see I'm not afraid to dig into a Kronos.
Why you no share video link?, says private and only cool people may view it.

I did not know that - they are not supposed to be private. Apparently Youtube is broken, or I don't know how to use it. I try to change to public, but videos remain set as private.

Xenophile · Post by **Xenophile** » Fri Jun 14, 2024 3:48 pm

timg11 wrote:
average_male wrote:
timg11 wrote:You can see I'm not afraid to dig into a Kronos.
Why you no share video link?, says private and only cool people may view it.
I did not know that - they are not supposed to be private. Apparently Youtube is broken, or I don't know how to use it. I try to change to public, but videos remain set as private.

It is working for me. Interesting stuff! Thanks for sharing!