You have to play a little bit....

I don't have an XBox 360 or a PS3...but I do like to relax with a bit of Guitar Hero or RockBand.

So when I am not mooching off friends...I get a bit of practice in at home...

For those doing the math on this, you may ask how?

On the side I have had a link for Frets On Fire, an open source GH replica. Within the forums you can find links to GH type song data.

There are also a ton of different mods to the basic software...and the original is so beta, some of the mods actually fix it.

My personal favorite mod is called Alarian (2.963 is the version I am using). It takes the basic FoF software, fixes, cleans, adds more visuals AND head to head with drums or base. (no vocals, and so far only head to head). Well now there are plenty of RB type song data out there so you have plenty to choose from...BTW you don't need to install anything else, this mod includes a well worked over version of FoF.

Of course now that you can play head to head with guitar against drums...how do you play the drums. I guess you could buy a set of RB drums...but at that point it might be easier just to get the XB360 and RB to have all the toys.

I happen to have a set of Roland electronic drums...that obviously are a billion times better than the RB or GHWT drums...but how can I use them?

That was my question ever since I first played RB at a friends house (I sucketh much on RB drums).

Of course some folks solved that problem...there are some hacked ways to use your real electronic drums with the Xbox/PS3 and RB...but I will be using my Rolands with my PC playing FoF.

This first thread looked like the answer...then I read a bit more and read this thread...which linked to this forum (Lord of the Rings online?) where some folks needed to use midi devices for something in the game...Well the Roland has MIDI out...and I had a standard USB to MIDI converter (mine is listed as E-MU XMidi 1X1).

So I downloaded the MIDI2Key linked in that last forum topic and unzipped it (v 0.9.0.4 so far). No installation required, but you do need to modify the MIDI2Key.ini file in the folder (if none then rename one of the others in the folder to that).

That is really the only hard point...I took one of the example files and simply assigned a different key to each entry, ran the software, opened up Notepad on top and started hitting the drum heads. From that I could tell which entry matched which drum head...I then put letters to match the key commands already assigned in the fretsonfire.ini file...for example...

;tom2 -blue
A1=
;HH -green
AS1=e
B1=
;tom1 -yellow
C2=t

player_2_key_drum1a = K_a
player_2_key_drum2a = K_e
player_2_key_drum3a = K_t
player_2_key_drum4a = K_u

It seems more complicated than it is.

But it works perfectly.

Obviously the FoF software is not a replacement for GH or RB...but the price is right.

There are screen shots available everywhere, and videos on Youtube.

N-Joi