Hey there fellow readers! I’ve had this idea about hacking Guitar Hero myself just so that my project could be used to demonstrate just why Electrical Engineering is cool (well, that’s part of it anyway). I’ve recently been looking at some projects started by others which seem to be pretty cool and work fairly well (HERE) and (HERE). Each of them has their strong and weak points, but I think I’ve made my decision on which path to take. Keep reading to find out!!

Well, if you follow the first link, you’ll find a project being done by Michael over at AutoGuitarHero.com. His idea is excellent and makes use of a very fun FPGA (which I’ve been meaning to buy, I just haven’t been able to justify buying one) and three daughter boards to process the video signal coming from the Wii and turn it into key presses and strums on the guitar. The problem with this project is the price. If I were to buy all these parts and the FPGA development board it would get very costly very quickly. This might be a candidate for a later project where I would obtain funding from the University, but not for recreational use. On to the next project.

I also found a project being done by none other than our nemesis A&M University. Some EE students seem to be using a technique similar to that of Michael’s but only utilizing a National Instruments development board. This project seems doable, but would require me to be sitting in the basement of our EE lab for several days/weeks while I worked the bugs out of the system. Once again, this one might be a candidate for later development…

On to the final idea (that I have anyway)! Scripting! I know, I wanted to stay away from this as much as possible, but it seems to be the easiest and cheapest to achieve! There are two ways that I could go about scripting the songs:

1. Something somewhat similar to what I would like to do can be found in this video. This would involve pre-recording the song with another guitar onto a computer and having the computer spit out the song at the correct speed. While this way might work, it definitely seems a bit messy and complicated to do.
2. Parse through a file which contains all the notes pre-written with the correct time and write a program to interpret the file and output to a parallel port. Not too bad I recently discovered that you can take apart a guitar hero game and extract certain files from within the game… one of those files happens to be the file I’m looking for! With a little pre-modification, I can take just about any .chart file from here and transform it into key presses!! Excellent!!

Now, as for hardware I would probably utilize the parallel port. Why you might ask? Well, my idea was that since I only have to control 6 outputs (and possibly make one or two of those inputs) I could probably use a parallel port to communicate with the guitar. It’s also inexpensive, requires little to no hardware, and is very easy to program with!! I have yet to open the guitar, but I’m guessing that I would require either some solid-state relays or some opto-isolaters to communicate with the guitar (easy enough) and probably an amplification circuit to make sure the correct levels are reaching the guitar and to avoid any problems (once again, easy enough). Other than that, it’s just a matter of getting the software written!

Once this gets done I would probably like to polish the design a little. I would probably incorporate some sort of wireless transmitter/receiver (I’ll probably take apart a PS2 controller or something) and communicate with the guitar wirelessly so that no one would know that I’m cheating… Muahahaha!

Please leave your comments!! I’d really like to see what you all think!! Maybe someone has already done this?

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