I just experienced a taste of heaven...

I was visiting my relatives in New York for a couple of days and it took way too long for me to realize that I should have asked my cousins if there was a DDR machine around the area a long time ago.

There wasn't.

Instead there was an ITG2 machine in a nearby pool hall. It was AWESOME.

Sure there was a small line for it but $0.50 got 5 songs, the pads were great and the fail requirement was 30+ misses.

I managed to get two turns before I left. I played:

Pandemonium , and
Vertex
Charlene
Summer ~speedy mix~

And other stuff that people made. I failed on the last step for Vertex . I failed SSM because I was tired. To finish off the day, I played Pandemonium with a person right next to me. I could tell he was thinking "You're insane."

I felt extremely satisfied after passing Pandemonium on with a C.

I wanted to get in a turn before I had to go but there was a massive line. I heard them playing this failure remix of Fascination MaxX.

I wanted to try Bend Your Mind.

And now I'm back in this entertainment wasteland called Philadelphia.

So how was your experience with an ITG/ITG2 machine?

Oh yeah, all I need to play custom songs on an ITG2 machine is an .ogg and an .sm file right? Does the .sm need something special in it to be played or can it be like the ones here?

---

I remember going to my arcade to play DDR MegaMix, (When they had Extreme and downgraded it ) and My bro was in front of me then I saw him freaking out. I looked and there was ITG2 Decab, 1.00$ 3 songs. It changed my dance game life. Good times.

As long as it's a .sm (NOT .sm OLD) and is under 2:00, and is an ogg file, you should be fine.

Max # of songs is 50, but it sometimes, it will not upload all the songs, so if you want to play them all, stay around 35.

---

Terrible. I've played on an ITG2 machine once and the pads were shit (only one-side worked and that was shit) and I failed Xuxa Oni. ;__;

ITG2 dedicabs are the shit. 10x better than DDR cabs imo. Sometimes, I even put DDR songs on my usb even though there's a SN right next to me.

---

Sometimes, when I'm at my most frequented arcade, I use their ITG2 machine to play SuperNOVA2 and Ultramix songs. I sometimes have to trim the songs a bit so they fall under 2:00. It's difficult, though, because the songs I wanna play (Love Is Dreaminess, Nemesis, etc.) are 2:00 at the end.

I've played on an ITG2 dedicab twice, but that machine sadly no longer exists... definitely like ITG2 dedicabs (as they're based off of PIU cabs), although I was able to annoy the ITG diehards by largely just selecting the various Eurodance songs they had in there, like The Message or Typical Tropical...

---

You could always apply the Ogg Length Patch to a .ogg file for a song that's as long as you want it to be, if the machine's an R21. Every ITG2 dedi I've ever seen was an R21, but I'm sure there are a considerable amount of R23's out there. You might as well have a few songs under 2:00 in case you find an ITG2 and it's R23.

One glitch with the Ogg Length Patch, though, affects StepMania's (and the ITG theme for StepMania) editor. If you try to start the music in the editor at any time past 105 seconds, it will not load the music. It plays fine if you start playing before 105 seconds. This is terrible news if you have a song that's at least 4 minutes long, and I emphasize that you finish your steps and syncing before applying the patch. I have a coupe 5-7 min songs in my R21 gallery that I couldn't re-sync recently, because of this. I may or may not re-upload the synced R21 files, unless someone actually cares about them.

---

I played on an ITG2 and it sucked. The pad was flat, so I couldn't tell where I was stepping half the time, and I had to step harder than I do on a DDR. The people there didn't even have the pad hooked up when I started playing.

---

I've talked to a couple people and apparently the no loading bug is from having too much stuff on your card, not just the song count. Need to get some spare USB drives so I can run some experiments, but keeping it under 50MB of songs/edits is probably a good idea. Having more songs also increases the time it takes to load and save your card data.

---