beware's DDR Extreme simulation - new: r3 beta

Just don't use the escape key then.

beware's DDR EXTREME is the only StepMania that does that, I tried reproducing the glitch on other 3.9 themes but it doesn't ESCAPE the "CHALLENGING MODE" screen...

For greater examples, TakuyaMAXX locked his Options Menu in ONI Mode in his DDR themes. Doing the ONI glitch will not work on regular 3.9s. Only beware's DDR EXTREME can reproduce the glitch.

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*IMPORTANT NOTE
In my video "DDR EXTREME glitch found in ONI mode," I set the glitch on TRICK. TRICK has mods included, so if you are using any modifiers with songs that have mods in them, they will not show up. BUT, if you're using a different noteskin than VIVID, it will show up perfectly.

(This was not shown in the video) ↓
SEXY PLANET (MOMO REMIX) only used REVERSE, so then the speed mod has been confirmed!

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I have detected something very weird.

feeling of love's audio around when wheel7 plays uses the same drum beat when planet2 plays, but in any of the real games (including the download on here, ZIv), there is no drum beat at all when wheel7 plays. I don't know where you got the one with the ghostly drumbeat, but the song is slightly different. I figured this out because I am familiar with drumless part, and I was listening to the song. That's weird... did I hallucinate that? I wanted to verify it, and I was right. That part WAS there in the original game. I wonder how that happened...

Anyway, background videos wise (of course), I discovered a trick to figure out how to make a movie match the speed of the song.

I learned from another background video thread on here that if you divide a song's BPM by 90, you get the speed of the video 30 fps videos go at, but this can't work on movies like ribbon2 and amoeba4, and all of those other odd-speed videos. And then I figured out how to get the trick to work with all of the movies.

It's clearly obvious, we all know 30 x 3 = 90, and the 30/original fps movies go at 90 BPM. So how it works; Amoeba4's fps is 42.161. Multiplying it by 3 = 126.483 (this really matters). So it must have been captured from (around) a 126 BPM song. To get Amoeba4 to go at 140 BPM, divide 140 by 126.483 and you get 1.107, so that's how to sync any background movie to a song. It's also easy to figure out the default speed of a movie (Amoeba4's is 0.711). You can find the exact movie's FPS through a program like Sony Vegas.

Here is an example script I made for a DDR EXTREME USA song, LADIES' NIGHT, following your standards (all lowercase and rounded at .750).

#BGCHANGES:15.750=discoball1.avi=1.072=1=0=0,
23.750=star1.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
27.750=star8.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
28.750=star8.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
29.750=star8.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
31.750=dance10.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
39.750=heart10.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
43.750=heart10r.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
47.750=ribbon1.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
55.750=text12.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
59.750=text12r.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
63.750=kaliedoscope8.avi=1.237=0=0=0,
79.750=star1.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
95.750=discoball1.avi=1.072=0=1=0,
111.750=star8.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
115.750=rotation5.avi=1.333=0=0=0,
119.750=star8.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
123.750=rotation5.avi=1.333=0=0=0, //rotation5r.avi
127.750=dance10.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
135.750=heart10.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
139.750=heart10r.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
143.750=ribbon1.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
151.750=text12.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
155.750=text12r.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
159.750=dance10.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
167.750=heart10.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
171.750=heart10r.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
175.750=ribbon1.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
183.750=text12.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
187.750=text12r.avi=1.333=0=1=0,
191.750=LADIES' NIGHT-bg.png=1.000=0=0=1;

i am aware of the oni/nonstop "back" glitch. it also happens with my default SM 3.9 theme (perhaps because it's an older version, the SMMAX theme). i also confirmed it doesn't happen with takuya's extreme and max2 themes. i intend to fix this.

I love this build... I've been running it in my original DDR cabinet.
The only thing I don't have running yet is lights.

I'm in the process of building a Parallel port light adapter, I was wondering does this include all of the driver files necessary to make that work?

I was also wondering if the lights were programmed to work just like the original arcade machine as well?

Thanks

i made the lights work as on the arcade. i changed nothing about the original drivers that were in SM 3.9, so you should be able to make it work, hopefully. i have never personally seen it drive real lights through some kind of IO (such as parallel), so this isn't tested to work.

I happen to know that MiniMaid USB Adapter uses lights for StepMania, but unfortunately it's for 3.9 PLUS and OpenITG Beta2.
Plus, it has only been tested on Windows XP. Unless you are running beware stepmania extreme on XP.
Just saying. :/

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Thanks for the quick reply
and thanks again for such an awesome build, I'll let you know how the lights work out.


I am running Beware's StepMania on WinXP...

The MiniMaid looks like a really nice piece of kit, however I can't justify spending $320 and then waiting several months.

I'd gladly pay $200 for something like that but with the price being asked it just makes more sense to build something myself.

This is especially true because there doesn't really seem to be much info about the product available. When I first started looking into it I had lots of questions about it's compatibility in certain regards and no one was able to give me a worthwhile answer.

I know that for the lights to work in vanilla Stepmania 3.9, you have to edit the 3.9 source code to enable the lights driver and then compile it into a working binary. The lights driver is already coded into Stepmania 3.9, but for some reason it was disabled.

http://www.stepmania.com/forums/showthread.php?18126-Fully-working-parallel-lights-driver-for-Windows

Beware, I think you're project is definitely what the community needs. This would be a nice replacement for the hard to find DDR extreme arcade kits if it had working lights support for Minimaid USB and any other device that supports the parellel drivers.

Yeah, I'm learning that the hard way... I build a driver board to hook up to the parallel port but I cant get SM to output any data since I'll need to re-compile the whole thing in order to change the port addresses.

the most annoying thing about the parallel lights is that the port addresses are hard coded to 0x378 and 0x278.
it would be awesome if it was modified to let us use a configuration setting to change the port address to our configuration.

the hard coded addresses only work if your motherboard happens to have 2 parallel ports built in, anyone with a mother board built since the turn of the century will likely need to use a PCI parallel port adapter (like me) and the addresses can change every-time you re-install the hardware or the os and they'll never be set as low as the old build-in defaults... right now my addresses ar 0xDD00 and 0xDF00 respectively.

The best situation would be if SM could utilize something like the Ultimarc PacDrive, that seems to be the standard for Arcade style light control... much cheaper and easier to source than a MiniMaid too.
http://ultimarc.com/pacdrive.html

EDIT:
Researching this further it seems as though someone Wrote Serial port drivers that are compatibile with an Arduino here: http://www.stepmania.com/forums/showthread.php?28920-HowTo-StepMania-Lights-with-Arduino&styleid=4

Also it seems that OpenITG includes Drivers for PacDrive... so it might just be a matter of including a few source files from oitg to get it working here... if nothing else including the serial driver would be a huge step up.


EDIT AGAIN:
I looked around and OpenITG does indeed include light output drivers for Pac Drive here: https://github.com/openitg/openitg/blob/master/src/arch/Lights/LightsDriver_PacDrive.cpp

Notice there are additional files in the io folder for Pac Drive.

One thing I notice is that the pacdrive driver also relies on something call "LightMapping" which is another .cpp file that seems to pull in light configuration data from another ini file (I'm guessing it allows you to map each light to your desired output pin)... I don't know enough about SM or C++ to know how compatibile these files would be if simply dropped into this version of SM.

@beware would you be willing to take a look at this source files and consider adding support for:
PacDrive Lights - may just need the ITG files included, it may need some tweaking I don't know
Serial Lights - this would just need the .cpp and .h files included when compiled nothing else really easy
Configurable Parallel lights instead of having the parallel address hard coded it would allow the address to be set in the .ini file, also it should be modified to use "Inpout32.dll" instead of "parallel_lights_io.dll"

"the most annoying thing about the parallel lights is that the port addresses are hard coded to 0x378 and 0x278.
it would be awesome if it was modified to let us use a configuration setting to change the port address to our configuration."

I'm not entirely sure, but I think the minimaid usb was built to overcome that. It uses the parallel dll file. Besides that I don't know why anyone would want to use a pacdrive. From what I've read you have to go and manually wire everything with a pacdrive and then you might have to replace all the lights with ones that pull lower volts/amps or risk burning out the pacdrive. A minimaid usb is simple plug and play solution and works with the connectors from the ddr system 573.

if it was built to overcome that then there must be some other piece of software that communicates the light information from those addresses into something the Minimaid can understand. There's no way that information would magically find it's way out to the device otherwise.

PacDrive is the defacto standard for lightoutput in custom PC based arcade hardware, it's used by pretty much everyone who wants to build Virtual Pins to MAME cabs with full light control... also they're dirt cheap ($30) which is less than 1/10th the cost of a Minimaid. It's supported by every major arcade emulator that needs light output. Obviously it was desirable enough that they decided to add official support in ITG.

So? IT's got screw terminals, so all you'd have to buy is the ITX-10 and ITX-6 pigtails and then screw them down... then it becomes every bit as plug and play as a MiniMaid.

Thats not how the lights in a DDR cab work. They're relay controlled by TTL level outputs inside the amp-box the PacDrive The actual draw from the lamps doesn't make one iota of difference on the control device and the PacDrive has more than enough juice to power the light controllers inside the cab.

You see people barking about low power output all the time when talking about Parallel Light output from StepMania but it only applies if you're creating your own custom lights, not when using an existing DDR cab. Even if it did apply to a DDR cab the MiniMaid would have the same problem as any other device, since (at least from every picture I've ever seen of it) it doesn't feature any high power lines or relays that would be capable of directly powering the lights in a DDR machine.

edit: i'd like to support pac drive, because of the advantages mentioned here: it's cheap, and it's a widely supported standard.
if i get 29 USD / 25 EUR worth of donations in my paypal (paypal@bircd.org) that say "pac drive" in them, i will buy a pac drive
UPDATE: amount has been met, pac drive is bought.


in the source/linux build environment i omitted files that are required to build this for windows, for size reasons.

i made a separate zip for compiling it on windows. it includes a readme.

https://ddr.bircd.org/compiling-beware-ex-on-windows.zip

the readme is quoted here also for review/comments:

for compiling beware stepmania extreme (r3) on windows

- you need directX 8.1 SDK (i believe others may give problems)
- you need MSVC 6. tested with one more recent version and it didn't compile.
- get stepmania 3.9 source + beware extreme patches from the linux archive included in beware extreme
- put the directories in this zip inside stepmania's src dir
- apply the beware extreme patches (diff files), (needs a "patch" program for windows, or do this on linux)
- open StepMania.dsw in the source in MSVC 6

if you don't apply the patches, the compilation should still work, and will then produce standard SM 3.9.

Payment sent

I have no problem supporting this, the work you've already done is greatly appreciated and adding support for more light output options will only benefit everyone.

You mentioned earlier on in the thread that this can accept custom simfiles, but I have spent the past couple hours going crazy trying to figure it out. I've successfully added the MAX. period file hosted on your site, Beware, but I can't get any other songs to show. No matter which folder I place them in, or even if I create new folders, I can only make MAX. period show. Is there some master list of songs I need to edit or something?

DDR Extreme was always my favorite mix and I absolutely love what you've done with this. That's why I'd like it to be my general Stepmania setup, but I'm lost here.


EDIT: Actually I'm sorry, it wasn't Beware who claimed this but Roflcakes. Anybody have any tips? I'm dying to get this going ASAP

the first list you see in the song wheel (with ~84 songs) is called "defaultlist". it is hard-defined in metrics.ini. press left+right to access the other sort modes. max period was not on the arcade, only on the console release (just FYI).

Oh I know about both those facts, but even when adding songs and changing the sort mode, none show as they typically would in Stepmania. Except your Max. period file.


EDIT: I'm not sure why none of this worked for me before. I gave it another shot today and everything seems to be working just as one would expect it to. Thank you for the tip about the defaultlist though, I used that to add Max. period to the end of the defaultlist even though it's a console song. Keep up the good work!

I've been working on improving parallel light output, I couldn't get MSVC6 to install properly on my Win7 machine so I decided to write an alternative parallel_lights_io.dll that would work properly with any port address.

Unfortunately I discovered that in your source code you have Windows Parallel light output disabled:

you need to un-comment line 14 of LightsDriver.cpp in order to enable light output. I've had to do my testing with OpenITG because of this.

EDIT:
I've written a replacement for parallel_lights_io.dll that fixes parallel light output... it uses all open source code you can distribute it with your SM release... you'll just need to uncomment that one line of code I mentioned. http://solid-orange.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/twistedsymphonys_stepmania_parallel_port_io_dll.zip

I would also recommend including the serial drivers that I posted earlier since that's basically a free light output option without any additional work required.

That just leave PACDrive output... I've ordered a pac drive for myself so I might play around with that a bit as well.

thanks for doing this work. when i get into this (which isn't right now, sorry), i will look at your parallel IO, and if you have it by then, your PacDrive IO, and get it all tested and working in beware extreme.

Oh yeah!
Before I forget, you have to fix some simfiles too. That is because some of them have MISSING DIFFICULTIES.
And that is BEGINNER:
Songs I discovered were MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE and celebrate. There could be more, but I'm not completely sure. I'll check when I have the time.

EDIT
TRIP MACHINE Survivor also does not have its difficulty!

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