06.24.07

Sweet Surrender

Posted in Coding, Gaming, Rants at 12:27 pm

I give up. Over the last 24 hours I have fought tooth and nail to try to get any of the three dance pads I owned to work with Stepmania on the Mac. And, while there is a solution available within my reach, I’m going to call it quits completely and just bite a pretty big bullet.

After looking at the sheer size of the Manhunt 2 rant and realizing, “Hey, that’s way too big”, I’m starting to use this “hide long rants” thing more often just because I don’t want to flood folks with really long, drawn-out diatribes for no reason. So…

Now, let’s start at last week, when I got all the major Konami official tracks for Stepmania moved onto the Mac mini what exists as my media center. See, it’s hooked up to the purty HDTV, so it is quite full of hugeness. Moreover, it’s also connected to the stereo system, so there is much soundness as well. Stepmania on the Mac has been good to me in the past; I’ve taken to tweaking the mini’s performance so as to prevent hiccups while dancing. Because it hadn’t seen much use in a while, I dusted off the old Ignition 3.0 pad and connected it. That’s where the troubles started.

For those of you who don’t own the Ignition 3.0, let me say this: it’s a step down from the 2.0. The 3.0 has (or in my case, had) thin but firm “panels” to raise the arrow sensors up from the face-button sensors. Over time, these panels drifted towards the center of the mat, which really, REALLY threw me off. I also suspected that they had a hand in messing up my steps, because every once in a while a step would get lost or delayed. Anyway, when I tried to use the 3.0 last weekend, the down arrow was not working well at all– probably only catching one out of every ten steps unless you stomped hard on it. For faster songs, that wasn’t an option.

Being an enterprising young man (read: I didn’t yet have the cash to go out and buy a new mat, nor was I particularly inclined to buy a second 3.0 anyway based on the quality of this one), I decided that some open-pad surgery was in order. I gently cut inside the mat, making sure not to slice any wires, and attempted to remove the risers. I say “attempted” because they were connected with the single stickiest substance I have ever encountered. This stuff just plain did not come off my hands for hours. I washed like I was an OCD crack addict under pressure and it still stayed on. This also baffled me because, if it was so damn sticky, how the hell did the risers move? Anyway, I finally got the risers out, closed the pad, and fired it up one more time.

Now it completely didn’t work. Ah well, I thought; I didn’t really like that pad anyway. Plan B: Find a new USB pad. I glanced over at my 360 and thought, “Hrm.” See, the 360 uses basic USB for its wired peripherals (just like the PS3 and the Wii– we’re getting to that later). I went out and picked up the Mad Catz Beat Pad 360, figuring “Hey, worst-case scenario is I have to buy DDR Universe. It could be worse, right?”

Naturally it didn’t work, either. Because it wasn’t being recognized as a controller at all; OS X just plain didn’t know what to do with it. As I’d mentioned, I did find a set of drivers that connected basic 360 controllers to the Mac, and I tried those; that also didn’t work because the drivers didn’t recognize the Beat Pad as a 360 controller and left it up to the OS, which likewise said, “I still don’t know what the hell you want me to do with this”.

(A side note is that I did try to use the Beat Pad on the PC, and it was recognized properly– there are even drivers for it! If I really wanted to, I could simply connect the PC to the HDTV and use that– or more likely, just play on the PC as-is, but I’d really rather not do that. I probably will until… well, you’ll see.)

I had one last option available to me; Wal-mart nearby was carrying a cheapo PS2/PC converter and dance mats. I figured that there was no harm in trying; well, aside from my already fragile patience. As per usual, no good. It was closer, though; the directional buttons on the pad were being recognized as a controller by the Mac, but they were recognized as the axes of the joystick and not as digital buttons. Meaning that I couldn’t hit left and right at the same time– something pretty much essential to DDR. I gave up for the night.

The unpleasantness of Monday happened, then, and I didn’t have much impetus to try messing with the pads again until last night. I figured, “The guy who wrote that driver for the 360 controllers put the source code up. I can go ahead and just hack the Beat Pad onto it.” Well, yeah, I had the option, but I certainly was not capable. Let me rephrase that: after hacking the plist file that contained the controller descriptions, compiling the driver across two different Macs (and two different architectures), and fighting with Unix’s draconian permissions rules, I eventually got a working kernel extension file out of it. Which, when I tried to use the Beat Pad, politely told me to f%#$ off, as I had somehow not installed it properly.

I later discovered that the Pelican PS2-to-PS3 adapter is, basically, a USB adapter. A quick (final) trip to the store and I had snagged one; the clerk asked me to let her know if it worked. As you may have guessed by now– it didn’t. It has the same exact problem as the other adapter; it maps the arrows to the joystick axes. I presume that the PS3 knows what to do with it because the instructions for it say, “connect your dance mat”. (Which reminds me, does anyone with a PS3 need one of the adapters? I got one I’m not using… and as long as you’re not using it for Guitar Hero, it appears to work well enough.)

So I quit. I am not going to fight with it any more, and I am not going to fart around with hacking together a homemade solution. I had an unexpectedly prompt windfall on Saturday, so as soon as that is in my account, I’m picking up a metal dance pad and just using that. I’ve wanted a metal pad for a while now, and they’ve dropped in price sufficiently that it’s worth it… at least, until DDR picks up in popularity again. Which, well, I don’t think it will, but it could happen.

I feel a LOT better now that I’ve given up on a hopeless quest.

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