Edirol CG-8 Repair Guide

Overview

The Edirol CG-8 is a "visual synthesiser" made by Roland around 2005. It sits at the boundary between hardware and software VJing, and its form factor reflects this. While fitting into a classic 2000s-era VJ hardware rig with, say, an Edirol P10 video sampler and an Edirol V4 video mixer, it is basically an off-the-shelf computer running custom software with a custom control surface. As such, it should be quite repairable, so long as you have access to the software and can source some original components, or compatible replacements. It is our goal at the Computer Arts Archive CIC in Leicester to keep the CG-8 alive as part of our Live Multinmedia project and collection. If you can support this project, especially if you can supply knowledge or spares, please get in touch. This document is a work in progress maintained by Sean Clark.

Edirol CG-8 on the Inside

Main Power Board

Notes:

Computer Hardware

VIA EPIA M PC Motherboard

The CG-8 uses a VIA EPIA M mini ITX PC motherboard produced in the early to mid-2000s. It uses the VIA CLE266 chipset and comes with 512MB RAM in its single UDIMM memory slot and a 2.5-inch 40 GB hard drive, connected via IDE. The Retro Web provides comprehensive information about the board and notes that, like many computers of its era, it is prone to "faulty or leaking electrolytic capacitors".

• VIA EPIA-M User's Manual
• VIA EPIA-M at The Retro Web
• Review: VIA EPIA M10000 (2nd June 2003)

Notes:

512Mb RAM

The RAM is in the form of a single 512Mb DDR UDIMM PC2100 chip. According to the user manual, the motherboard has a maximum RAM size of 1GB.

40Gb Hard Drive

Notes: The 2.5-inch IDE connector is not well-suited to regularly plugging and unplugging while testing. It's easy to bend and misalign pins. SATA is much more robust. I therefore use an IDE to SATA cable and use Hitachi 40GB SATA HD drives. I have tried an SSD drive, but so far, I have had no luck making this work. See the instructions below to copy your hard drive to a new disk.

Software

Disk Images

• Boot to CG8
• Boot to Console
• Experimental

Diagnostics

1) Before doing any work on the CG-8, you should back up and clone the internal hard drive. It is strongly recommended that you don't do any diagnostic work with your original hard drive in place. 2) Be electrically safe.. Some areas of the CG-8 internals carry high voltage, even when the power is off. particularly the power boards. 3) Do not be tempted to plug/unplug anything while the power to the CG-8 is on. Doing so is likely to cause damage.