Vehemently Vitriolic

So I bought Guitar Hero II a couple months back. Once I learned it, it didn’t take long to finish it off. It was ultra-addictive, but after finishing it on Hard, I needed…..more. Sure, theres Expert level, but after playing non-stop for a month, the same songs get a little tiresome. So, I bought Guitar Hero I. And finished that on Hard in two days. Ho hum.

Then a friend of mine showed me Frets On Fire and I instantly thought it was awesome. It’s essentially a FLOSS version of the Guitar Hero franchise, with the ability to add songs on your own (or from others at the great forum site) which really is the reason I bought GHI. Not to finish another game, but becuase playing the songs is fun (though, it must be said, if you know how to play even a little bit of real guitar, starting with the controller is a little cumbersome and just, well, wrong).

The big problem with FoF is that you need either to play on a keyboard, or get one of the mods (I like the RF-Mod, which seems to be about the only one compiled for Linux). You can also use a joystick using joy2key to emulate keystrokes. But, the holy grail, obviously, is to play on the guitar. I already had one for my PS2, so I went about finding an adapter to USB.

The first one I tried was from Electronics Boutique. It was actually a PS2-PS3 adapter. But, the PS3 uses a USB port, so my thought was, heck, it must be a standard USB UHCI complaint device. I somehow forgot that SONY only uses existing standards when the mood hits them right. The adpater DID appear in dmesg, but the buttons mapped were completely wrong. The pick was a POV-hat for one, and only worked in one direction. A couple of the buttons showed as directional axis. Bizarre. Anyway, don’t get that one.

Second up, I tried Radio Shack. I found some forums posts where Dance Dance Revolution PS2 mats had been converted to USB using one of the Radio Shack ones. So, I went off and bought one. This is about the WORST device I have ever plugged in to a USB port. Not only did it not appear as any known device in demsg, the kernel paniced when the guitar was plugged in to it. A little MORE research found the Nexxtech version is god-awful and does not adhere to any sort of standards whatsoever and requires the DirectX layer to even function in Windows. Total garbage.

Third up, the winnnnnnaaa……a $0.99 piece from eBay. I bought this one which I post here in hopes it will help some other wayward Ubuntu user trying to get something to work with their Guitar Hero guitars. The shipping took an inordinate amount of time (like 3-weeks), but when it did arrive, it worked great (even with the wireless guitar).

Well, kinda. I tried it first on my regular Kubuntu desktop running 2.6.19-17-generic. It did show as Twin USB Joystick, but there was an odd error where any button pushed down would flicker like mad. Some forum hopping and I found it had to do with the HID kernel module having some issues, which were apparently fixed in 2.6.20-16-generic. so I installed that. It got better after that, but was not fixed.

I then plugged it in to my MythTV box where it would ultimately live running 2.6.17-12-generic and it ran perfectly without an issue. I fired up FoF with the RF-mod, and it detected the joystick and allowed me to assign keys to it, and its quite responsive.

So there you go. If you run Windows (and really, why would you) just about any adapter will work as they do not need to be USB-compliant as they can use various abstraction layers. But if you run Ubuntu, the one from eBay is key. As well, if you are running Feisty and have a kernel above 2.6.17, it may be worth upgrading to Gutsy as this issue is fixed (apparently. I upgraded the Kubuntu kernel to the Gutsy kernel and it made little difference, but did not do a full-blown upgrade to Gutsy).