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Guitar Hero II Coming to 360
Eurogamer reports that Guitar Hero II is coming to 360 at some indeterminate time in the future. From the article: "'The tour will continue the rockin' gameplay Guitar Hero fans have come to enjoy, and will now include expanded Xbox 360 capabilities,' according to RedOctane president Kai Huang. Who sounds pretty hip. Well, I think that sells the console pretty much single-handedly. Sony: it's SO OVER. 'With Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 rock rhythm, lead, or bass guitar tracks with downloadable content and the new X-Plorer controller, designed specifically for the Xbox 360.' Woo! Yeah!" All I know is that the axe is killer.
People have already been doing this to an extent. You can't just use the pickups in the real guitar because they output an analog signal. In theory, you "could" put together an external board which you plug the guitar into and have it decide what note you are hitting, but the problem is that in the game, there are only 5 frets. So you need to have 5 "steps" of frequency to figure out what notes you are hitting, but you also need to remember that you can hit multiple frets at the same time, so you would then need to have multiple external highpass/lowpass filters to discretely separate the signal into the 5 frequency bins to coorespond to the 5 different frets on the game controler. Now if you do this, how do you send the fignal for the wammy bar, since all the wammy bar does is lower or raise the frequency of the note? It would be impossible to calculate if the wammy was being used since you are simply dumping the analog out, splitting the different frequency ranges detected and putting digital on/off for each of those frequency ranges. Now this didn't even come close to talking about the harmonic frequencies that will also be generated when strumming a single string on a guitar (you will get multiple harmonics from each string, 1st order, 2nd order and sometimes even 3rd order are easily detectible).
So to make the long story short, no you can't just plug a regular guitar into a box and have it output guitar hero controller data. You CAN however, take a real guitar, pull out the pickups, remove the strings, cuts wholes for the frets in the neck, run a bunch of lines through the neck using the slot for the neck truss bar (or cut your own), put in your own wammy bar, tilt sensor, start/select buttons, and strum bar/mechanism, and wire it to a sony PS2 controller board (make sure you wire properly, the left analog directional key needs to be hard wires in the down position, and the up and down analog directional keys need to be wired to the strum bar's up/down motions, etc., etc.,)
There are lots of people who have taken cheap guitars and did this to them (or broken guitars, or even their normal guitar and swapped out the neck and electronics, this is easy to do on Fender Strats since the neck is bolt on and the electronics are all attached to the pickguard).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
They've already announced that ALL THREE next-gen systems will be getting Guitar Hero ports next year. It's just that this article only mentions the XBox 360 because, well, Zonk posted it.