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I WANT MOSH MOSH REVOLUTION!!!

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MOSH

MOSH

REVOLUTION !!!

only to see all of the teenage girls are giggling over the skinny Asian kid jumping up and down to bad techno music.

Then propose to work with the arcade operator to convert the cabinet to a StepMania machine, without the "bad techno music" as you call it.

You can already do that now with flight sims and driving sims etc, but certain things just can't used like that because the input device technology is not sufficient.

Into which category do you believe dancing simulations fit? The latest one for PS2 uses a 3'x3' platform for the feet and a camera for the hands.

an old DDR cabinet, KnoppixMAME, StepMania, and a few days of free time. Then I will never have to leave the house again!

stepmainia is probably your solution. I haven't downloaded it and tried it myself, but I believe its a free ddr type game for your pc. You will still have to buy some sort of ps2 to usb converter (usually around 13ish bucks) and a dancepad, but otherwise it is free. I also believe you have to find songs to download, and I think you can create your own, but i'm not sure what's involed with that, and you probably have to know the game very well to make good songs. But either way, i assume you can find a great variety of music to plug into stepmanaia to play.

There are both Windows and Linux versions avaliable, as well as source code.
There's also an Mac OS X version on the same site.

Stepmania as mentioned in the previous thread is an open source implementation of DDR. If you want to make stages for those songs there are tools to do it. There are also, undoubtably, plenty of impossibly fast songs to choose from.

There are both Windows and Linux versions avaliable, as well as source code. Avaliable here.

It dosn't come with any song/step files, however, you can make your own or download ones made by others. Word is, entire official DDR mixes for Stepmania are avaliable out there on the net.

This is the perfect time to plug StepMania, an open source version you can get here. I'm not a developer, just someone that enjoys short techno songs and a frantic workout.

All right, first off, I would like to say that I have lost weight by playing DDR - not much, mind you, but some. Enough for me. (I do other things too, but primarily DDR.) As far as equipment goes, it sounds like what you are looking for is very similar to my own setup. I use an open-source DDR emulator called Stepmania that runs under Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. (Note, I run it under Windows, personally, and cannot vouch for how well the other versions work.) I use a pair of pads that I bought off eBay for about $40 (similar to these), which I like a lot better than the really thin ones that tend to be more common. Finally, I have an adapter to hook the Playstation gamepads to my PC through USB. As for songs, there are several places around the Net to find them...I'm sure someone else will mention them, but just know that it's illegal to have them unless you own a copy of them (which sometimes means having a machine). As such, I'll leave that as an exercise for you to find, if you so wish.

StepMania is fantastic, and is open source. The only tricky thing is finding the songs to play on it, there are a few free ones and people have converted a lot of the (copyrighted) Dance Dance Revolution ones, but they're obviously of dubious legality. There are a few IRC channels around where you can download packs of all the songs.

It's a fantastic program, and there's even an Xbox port! Try it, I think you'll be surprised how polished it feels!

I don't have any experience of losing weight with it though - I kind of have the opposite problem. :-)

um. i suggest you get a ps2->usb adapter and a ps2 controller...most serious gamers have some sort of controller like that. If you loathe sony, you can take any xbox controller and convert it to use it on pc usb.

I know of 2 freesource clones of DDR.

Stepmania seems to be the most popular of the two, but seems to depend on propriatary data ripped from DDR (which became an issue when someone tried to put it in debian).

Pydance only has 3 songs for it, but is otherwise ok.

Somebody over at the DDRFreak forums had even mentioned that they created a stepfile generator.

If Tux Racer and StepMania have proven themselves worth of being converted to commercial arcade games, doesn't that redeem them a bit? (Pun semi-intended, as arcade Tux Racer spits tickets.)

On what basis do you call NetHack with one of the new GUIs "lame crap"? I bet several dozen geeks are ready to descend upon thee.

And don't forget about proprietary games available to NVIDIA video card owners at no cost beyond bandwidth, such as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

Fans of Nine Inch Nails should try this experiment: Listen to "Wish" from Broken and dance around like a DDR player on Crack 300. (If you have installed the free StepMania dance simulator on your PC, you can set this up with the "Maxx Wishful" simfile available here.) Immediately afterwards, listen to "Piggy" from The Downward Spiral sped up to 1.7xmusic and dance around like a hamster. Your brain's emotion center will have become so utterly confused that it'll have to reboot and choose a new random mood. You might just get the mood you want.

actually... Dance Dance Revolution for linux has already been developed. Step Mania o.O ... Okay, I suck at life...

Of course, the best solution of all is both...so spend a half hour in front of the PC, working on your arms, shoulders, back and chest, then take a nice half hour jog.

Or just get StepMania, a Dance Dance Revolution simulator for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

My PC has a Pentium III 866 MHz, and it supports a port of DDR (not just 2nd Mix but all the way to 8th Mix through bumper packs) just fine through the StepMania simulator. If you want to contribute AMD64 builds of StepMania, go right ahead; StepMania is free software.

I beleive StepMania has support for Pump It Up
one of the other arcades around here had PIU, but it kinda sucked.

Actually, it's already done, just need to port it.

www.stepmania.com

Ok, so it ended up connected to a PC, but I took one of these and turned it into a StepMania machine.

Basically, it was just a matter of getting a 50-pin scsi cable and hacking it apart, connecting it to the already-present centronix connector for the pads, and sitting with a multimeter to figure out which wire went with which sensor (9 pads x 4 sensors x 2 players = a buttload of wires to test). Then, taking the wires, attaching them to a terminal strip, where the other end got soldered to torn-apart playstation controllers.

Then, run the PS controllers through your basic Boom PS->USB converter to the PC, and voila! Actual, real arcade dance pads for SM. Luckily, the monitor was a standard VGA and the sound just two stereo 1/8" jacks, so that was all that needed doing. The rumor is that SM is going to add a lights driver, so it's possible I'll even be able to get the stage and machine lights to work at some point, too.

The PC behind the scenes is a Shuttle XPC with an Athlon XP 2600+ in it. When running SM, you'd be hard pressed to know it's not a regular DDR machine, except for the over 1k songs that it has on it. Oh, and that it's a Korean knockoff version's cabinet, but that's minor, really.

Though, I do have to giggle every time I see the arcade machine boot up a Windows XP screen. ;)

Ever tried pydance or StepMania? Or do you just not have the rhythm?

More information at Stepmania - even more if they ever get their board back from ddrmaniax.

I was referring to Taiko No Tatsujin, which is produced by Namco.
DDR is produced by Konami.
By the way, you can play DDR on the PC, and an even better option is Stepmania

If you want to get in shape, you're supposed to play StepMania, not Tetanus On Drugs.

The Kiki adapter sucks. I use the EMS USB2 adapter. Now my original question: What PS/PS2 controller accepts arm position input for Para Para Paradise without costing $100 plus shipping?

There's an open-source clone of DDR called stepmania that also supports EZ2Dancer. I don't know for sure if it supports Para Para Paradise in the latest version, but I think they're trying to work most of the other music-game formats into it.

(Aside: sold my HotRod in hopes of getting an X-Arcade soon... having the one stick for most of the systems I have is a big bonus in the wife-doesn't-want-stuff-cluttering-basement dept.)

Besides a real stick, I agree that the PS1/PS2 USB adaptors are the way to go. I've had good luck with the one I have (don't remember the name off the top of my head, but you can find a good list here on the Stepmania site. Those DDR freaks know their PSX adapters!

PSJOY is the best PSX USB adapter that I've heard of. I have one, works like a charm. In windows it operates on DirectInput as well I think, so pretty much anything that uses DirectX should interface to it. I primarily do NES, Game Boy, SNES, N64, and Arcade emulation and haven't had a problem

I don't know about Linux support.

Also, it's the preferred PSX adapter according to the Stepmania site which has a nice analysis of the PSX adapters, at least in terms of DDR Simulation/Emulation.

PS Joy Converter

That and a Playstation Dual Shock controller will do you real well (also works with ddr pads... woot for stepmania!)

but where I live, it goes down to -30 or -40 in the winter.

StepMania is cardio for people who for some reason can't leave the house. Controller sold separately.

The ems usb2 works pretty easily under windows, and both under linux and windows, Stepmania will autoconfigure the pads correctly on it. Very reccomended for fellow ddr junkies.

Check out this page here for adapters which work, and perhaps the forums for ones which work under linux.

They "should" just be USB HID devices, so they "should" work, but there are some caveats...

Anyway, hands down, the best gamepad is the playstation 2 gamepad. Before that, it was the playstation gamepad. It is amazing how much all gamepads in the console industry suck, except for the playstation ones. Nintendo started out pretty good, the NES and SNES pads were nice, but the n64 on up sucked.

I have an "emulation station", a computer hooked up to my TV, with NES, SNES, sega, etc emulators on it, and it's controlled via ps2 gamepads, and playing on it is absolutely awesome.

It would be cheaper to just get a pair of Cobalt Flux platforms, and hook that up to a PC with Stepmania, or even a PS2 with DDR MAX/DDR MAX 2.

Though a full-sized DDR machine would be cool as hell to have!

StepMania is a GPL'd rhythm game for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Combine it with two PS1 dance pads, a 2xPS1 to USB controller adapter, and some Tournamixes, and have hours of fun.

Not all Linux users' muscles have atrophied. Pydance and StepMania are physical exercise games that both run in Linux.

Not only does it encourage isolation, but it discourages them from healthy activity (you know, riding your bike, sports)

How is dancing not "healthy activity"?

My kids would lynch me if they had to deal with stuff Tux Racer and others of that ilk.

Would you consider StepMania, a GPL rhythm game, to fall into "others of that ilk"?

When the penalty for DWI in the USA was pretty wimpy it happened all the time, but now the penalty is total financial and employable destruction

So should I switch from Dance With Intensity to StepMania?

More like Dances With Arrows

I would recommend pyDance or Stepmania for exercise in a fun, hasslefree and open source flavor.
You just need a dance mat and a PSX2PC adapter to start. You can do it at home, you can start on a slow and easy level and get better while seeing the success in your scores and a half hour can easily get your shirt soaked with sweat.

Well, I as well am stuck in a cube with a computer most of the day, and as I get older, my metabolism certainly isn't what it once was (I used to be able to eat as much of anything as I wanted and stay thin, but those habits are catching up to me now).

On a whim, I was at Fry's Electronics and tried out the home Dance Dance Revolution pads they had there, and immediately got hooked. So I bought it for PS2. Initially, it didn't seem like exercise, but as I progressed and started working on mastering the harder songs at higher difficulty levels, I started sweating up a storm. I mean BUCKETS. Now, I play using StepMania, a DDR simulator for PC's, along with the over 500 tracks I've picked up from various sources on the Net. So I don't get bored, and it's really a lot of fun. You can get away with a basic PS2 mat and PS2->PC adapter for under $50, and Stepmania's open-source (so it's free).

My wife enjoys playing, and I've introduced lots of people to it, and I've lost a few pounds to boot. (And I haven't changed my eating habits yet, either).

Give it a shot; it's not just for the kids, I promise.

The BTC-5339 keyboard was the best I have ever used. It has soft foam inside the keys, while still being a mechanical keyboard, which makes for a soft, pleasing feedback. One of its nice features is the non-matrix based circuitry, meaning that you can hit any number of keys(useful for StepMania) at the same time.

The model M has harder keys and louder clicking noise, but has a great feel as well. Unfortunately, I have the small model without the numeric keypad, which means that one has to press Shift+Scroll lock to shift between a regular keyboard and numeric keypad input mode. Worse, it seems to default to numeric keypad mode(at least in Windows 2000 with the Japanese IME enabled), which is annoying. But the detachable cord is really cool.

My fiance and I regularly sit around playing our GBA SPs together, and DDR is one of my favorite ways to work out.

One question about DDR:

Do you think downloading a song off MP3.com, making a stepfile, and playing it in DWI or StepMania constitutes taking of money that should otherwise belong to Konami?

Written by a guy I know, it is a great app and no charge. So he didn't write it in linux. So what. Website is here and the stepmania binary is here.

Because the concept of the game is sound, it's just the music which is crap. Any hints of something like this in the works somewhere?
How can you say that about DDR music? It rocks to all hell. But then, there are those (strange) people who don't like Eurodance, so...

Anyway, go check out StepMania or Dance With Intensity. SM is open-source, but I prefer DWI because of the arcade similarity.

You can find various DWI files scattered through the 'net; some places to look are ddrei.com and ddruk.com ...

A round of pyddr or Stepmania each two hours should be enough to prevent DVT and it is also a lot of fun. (Well, you probably won't want to do that in your office, but I think it should be ok at home.)
But you shouldn't do that when you already sat down for 10 hours, then you would maybe even trigger the DVT with that.

make it perform the same as a Radeon DDR

For me, DDR performs perfectly well even with an old beat-up TNT2.

Expensive? Home simulators are free-- look at stepmania or DWI. When I first started playing almost 3 years ago, it was just a few of us regulars. Only a few people would just randomly (interestingly enough, most of these people were Asain-- cultural thing I guess). Over the next two years, more and more mainstream-looking males would play. This past year, however, it's gone mainstream enough that even girls play it. My local arcade actually has a pretty even gender split, and there are often more girls playing DDR than boys! These aren't tomboys either. I mean like miniskirt, purse and cell-phone girls. With all this added attention, almost every arcade has one now. When I first started playing, it was $1.50 for 3 songs. Now it's $0.50 for the same 3 songs, and the lines are shorter because there are more machines. On challening ("Oni") mode, good dancers can spend 15 minutes on a single credit. That's NOT expensive. Even for beginner players, it's cheaper than working out at a gym, plus you meet cool people, and you actually DO it. Mock all you want, but you're missing out