Creating Wireless Guitar, Possibility of creating a wireless guitar Options

[xboxmodder4life]

I took the guitar apart and was thinking, i could easily fit a wireless controller board inside the guitar, the issue becomes there is no whammy bar mapped to a button on the standard controller. Anyone have any ideas for creating a wireless guitar with a wireless controller board which would allow the whammy to work? I could create a wireless guitar with everything but the whammy bar which for me would take alot from the game.

This post has been edited by xboxmodder4life: Apr 8 2007, 06:31 PM

[tankertux]

Interesting idea, as I've thought about this as well.


Good news: The whammy bar is mapped to the left analog stick and star power is mapped to the Back button (although you would need to rig up a tilt sensor to it)

Bad news: The bumpers and triggers are mapped to a simultaneous pressing of the fret buttons AND the strum bar, so you would need to come up with a logical system to separate these two button presses into one on the controller. In other words, if you just map the triggers/bumpers directly to fret buttons, you could play without ever strumming and you wouldn't be able to push fret buttons without it counting as a strum as well.

That said, it is definitely possible, but it would take some planning and several hours. Personally, I'd love to see it done before MS comes out with one.

[jimjom]

I have a wireless 360 controller and an old school ps2 guitar. I SO want to do this. Someone point me in the direction I need to go, i.e. points and mapping and such.

If someone figures it out, I'll do it! lol.....


ADD: I am dead serious, Ill tear both these fuckers apart, bow to stern.

This post has been edited by jimjom: Apr 9 2007, 06:33 AM

[Perplexer]

Yes, I actually converted a PS2 guitar to wireless (before the wireless guitars were available.)

On the PS2 guitar, the left D-pad was tied to GND, which told the game that a guitar controller was connected. This allowed the fret buttons and strum bar to work correctly.

I borrowed a friend's game and guitar, and tried holding the Xbox360 wireless controller dpad left when starting up the game, but it didn't work like the PS2. I'd imagine that the method is different, maybe someone else can poke and prod and see what happens (I've not been permitted to hack my friend's guitar )

[Edit] HERE is the PS2 tutorial...

This post has been edited by Perplexer: Apr 9 2007, 09:43 PM

[tankertux]

I would like to add some specifics to my post:

The whammy bar is specifically mapped to the Y-Axis of the left analog stick.

Also, from playing around with the game using just the controller, it is apparent that there are two different control schemes used in the game:

For example, in the menus, A, B, and the D-Pad are used for navigation (even though the menu says to use the frets to navigate). This indicates that in the menus, the frets are mapped to A and B, and the strum bar is mapped to the D-pad.

Second, during gameplay the frets (plus a single strum) are mapped to the triggers and bumpers (and the 5th fret/strum is mapped to A).

If people don't care too much about ease of navigating the menus, the buttons could be mapped fairly easily (forgetting about the seperation of fret press and strum). However, it would be interesting to see what kind of communication there is between the game and the controller that allows the controller to differentiate between a gameplay state and a menu state.


[EDIT] I didn't read Perplexers reply very thoroughly. It seems he's addressing some of these issues. Tonight I'll play around with holding buttons down during the game startup. I don't know if it makes a difference, but the left D-pad was tied to +3v not GND.

This post has been edited by tankertux: Apr 9 2007, 11:23 PM

[tankertux]

Oops, double post.

This post has been edited by tankertux: Apr 9 2007, 11:28 PM

[xboxmodder4life]

i will be willing to give this a go if we can figure out how the 360 guitar hero decides whether the gamepad or guitar is being used, and the best/easiest/cheapest way to create a wireless controller

[DanITman]

All great minds think alike. I too have taken both apart and started poking around. I'm wondering if there is a way to find out what command is being sent to the xbox 360 to tell it that the guitar is connected and not a normal wired controller.

Once you open the guitar and look under the fret buttons you will see what commands are being sent to the 360 to correspond to that individual fret you are holding down. I believe it's something like X, B, Y, LT or something like that.

If we can find out a way to get a normal controller to be recognized as the guitar this would be a very simple hack.



Once I get home from work, I'll try starting the game up and holding down different button configurations to see if I can get it to recognize my wireless controller as a guitar. If anyone wants to help out be sure to post your results here.

[twistedsymphony]

I'm very interested in this mod as well...

Judging by the fact that the PS2 GH controller doesn't have a d-pad it makes sense that they would choose a d-pad direction to identify it... the Xbox 360 GH controller has a d-pad so I assume it would be another button not used by the controller

Looking at digital buttons alone:
Taken: back, start, guide, up, down, left, right, A, B, X, Y, ?

Possibilities: LB, RB, LS, RS

I'd start with those and different combinations of those. with those 4 buttons there are 14 possible combinations:
LB
RB
LS
RS
LB+RB
LB+LS
LB+RS
RB+LS
RB+RS
LS+RS
LB+RB+LS
LB+RB+RS
RB+LS+RS
LB+RB+LS+RS

[jimjom]

hells yeah! there is some progress here! wish i could further it, but it would seem I am only able to emulate it....

[twistedsymphony]

as a proponent of thinking smarter not harder I came up with the idea of simply plugging the GHII controller into your PC so that the built in drivers would tell you which buttons register as being held down (if any).

then I remember the article about the controller being used on Frets of Fire...

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/04/06/360s-gui...-frets-on-fire/

^Joystick took a picture of the calibration screen... as you'll notice there are NO buttons registered as being held down...

This tells me that the method used to determine if the device is a controller or a guitar is quite different then the PS2 method... chances are, it's a flag set in the USB protocol, and if that's the case then you'll never be able to get a controller to register as a guitar

This theory is further prooved by the fact that the driver recognizes it as the X-Plorer controller, meaning that the real name of the devices is being sent over the usb connection.

This post has been edited by twistedsymphony: Apr 16 2007, 08:16 PM

[DanITman]

as a proponent of thinking smarter not harder I came up with the idea of simply plugging the GHII controller into your PC so that the built in drivers would tell you which buttons register as being held down (if any).

then I remember the article about the controller being used on Frets of Fire...

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/04/06/360s-gui...-frets-on-fire/

^Joystick took a picture of the calibration screen... as you'll notice there are NO buttons registered as being held down...

This tells me that the method used to determine if the device is a controller or a guitar is quite different then the PS2 method... chances are, it's a flag set in the USB protocol, and if that's the case then you'll never be able to get a controller to register as a guitar

This theory is further prooved by the fact that the driver recognizes it as the X-Plorer controller, meaning that the real name of the devices is being sent over the usb connection.

Connecting the Guitar to the PC and connecting to the Xbox 360 are two different things. The Guitar could act totally different when connected to the Xbox as compared to connecting to a PC.

[twistedsymphony]

Connecting the Guitar to the PC and connecting to the Xbox 360 are two different things. The Guitar could act totally different when connected to the Xbox as compared to connecting to a PC.

That is highly unlikely. Rarely does the child device respond differently depending on the host. Most commonly the peripheral works the same way regardless of what it's connected to, and it's up to the host to interpret it.

Most peripheral devices aren't even aware of what they're connected to.

Judging by the fact that the guitar is recognized as a completely different device ID it's likely using completely different firmware for communication. This is further proven by the fact that the official MS controller drivers on the PC work but none of the generic homebrew drivers for Mac or Linux do.

I'm not saying it's impossible for it to act differently but I'd bet money that it responds the same way to PCs and 360s alike.

[jimjom]

I still would love to have a wireless old school ps2 controller hybrid work on 360. Should I just try this anyways and see how far I get? Or is this a pointless venture...?

[twistedsymphony]

I still would love to have a wireless old school ps2 controller hybrid work on 360. Should I just try this anyways and see how far I get? Or is this a pointless venture...?

From what I understand of the how the 360 guitar works there are only 2 possible ways to get a wireless guitar

1. hack up a wireless controller and have the game recognize the guitar as a gamepad (as opposed to a guitar)
-This solution is viable but it will cost you for the wireless controller, and has the added disadvantage of requiring some kind of way to hack strum control... I have a vague idea of how this could be done but you'll probably need to use a microcontroller to get it done efficiently.

2. hack up a 360 guitar and built a custom wireless solution including a USB dongle (The game still thinks it's a wired guitar).
-This solution is viable also but is much more expensive. You'll need to front the cash for a wireless transmitter/receiver capable of transmitting 12 digital I/O channels and 2 analog I/O channels and doing it fast enough that you can still play the game without controller lag. All of the controller guts from the guitar would need to be moved into a giant dongle with the receiver that you'd plug into your 360 and the original controller would be nothing more then the buttons and sensors and a transmitter.

or I suppose you could wait to see if an official solution is ever produced...

Based on the way it's designed I really don't think it's possible to make a wireless guitar using the same wireless as the official controllers... it's just not possible without the controller security being hacked (and I doubt we'll see that happen any time soon)

This post has been edited by twistedsymphony: Apr 18 2007, 04:55 PM