We’ve been working on some odds and ends, but we just wanted to share a little video showing off the versatility of the OpenChord controller kit – We reprogrammed the V1 to show up as a DualShock 3 on the PS3, and here’s Alan playing a bit of Street Fighter 4, on the guitar:

The code for this is in the SVN, under the Guitar Fighting branch – feel free to download it and put it on your V1. In order to update the firmware, plug the V1 into a PC while holding the red/plus button – it should show up in Windows as BootloaderHID. Then grab this program here, hit “Find Device”, then choose the appropriate .hex file, then hit upload. You should be fighting in no time!

First, the bad news – We’re not going to be able to implement Xbox 360 compatibility on our own.  Looking into it, the security the 360 uses is based on a pretty hardcore chip, and while that chip has been recently hacked, doing so involves using an electron microscope, and might only be valid for one chip at a time.  If anyone knows any contacts within Microsoft who might be able to talk to us regarding licensing these chips, we’d love to hear from you, but like most other big developers, Microsoft hasn’t been too keen on letting tiny companies get their hands on those chips.  I can’t blame them; if there were hundreds of cheap 3rd party controllers making the Xbox 360 experience much worse, or allowing for cheating on multiplayer online games, nobody blames the controller manufacturers, just Microsoft.  Still, for now, it looks like native 360 compatibility is out.  However, if you’re really interested in using the V1 on the 360, send us an e-mail, since if you’re willing to use the circuit board from an existing guitar controller, we can probably work something out for that pretty easily.

On the good news side of things, after some re-jiggering and testing, we’ve merged the Wii and PS3 firmware!  This means that you don’t have to do a firmware update to switch between the systems anymore, and it’s going to be easier to figure out which firmware  you need.  Instead of V1_Wii.hex and V1_USB.hex series’ of binaries, they’re being replaced by the OpenChordV1.hex series.  Most people should need the 12MHz hex file, but there are still some 16 Mhz boards out there – Anyone who bought kits at PAX or since then has the 12 MHz board, but to check, if you see 16.000 on the little silver oval on the PCB, then you’ve got a 16 MHz crystal, so you’ll need the 16 MHz code.  Or send us an e-mail if you’d like a 12 MHz crystal; we’re more than happy to drop one in the mail for you, free of charge.

After a few weeks of being on the East Coast, I’m finally back in Spokane, ready to start doing more hardcore engineering (and taxes.)! Right now, our Xbox 360 is Red Ringed, but I’m fixing that tomorrow; however, things aren’t looking so hot for Xbox support right now – nobody it seems has been able to get anything near working. Instead, everyone making arcade sticks and the like have just been ripping out the PCB from an existing controller and interfacing with that – since guitar controllers are at least $20 each, and a lot of plastic, it seems pretty expensive and wasteful to be ripping up whole controllers just for a little chip.. If it comes down to that, though, we’ll go ahead and make some instructions for how to add Xbox 360 support in such a way.

That said, we’re also looking at getting an oscilloscope to check out and see if we can maybe send the proper signals to the Xbox – we’ll let you know how that one goes, but judging from the seeming lack of 3rd party Chinese controllers, it doesn’t look particularly promising, unfortunately.
As a side note, if anyone is interested in having a PlayStation2 compatible guitar, let us know. It’s something that we were working on, but couldn’t figure out; however, I’m starting up a project with Kellbot, working to integrate our boards with her awesome Katamari Ball, so since I’ll be dusting off that PS2 code, I’m wondering how much effort we should be putting into getting it to work for the guitar as well?

One thing we noticed a lot at PAX was that it’s hard for people to hit those green/yellow, red/blue, and yellow/orange in-game chords (what we refer to as “Gap Chords”) when you’re in fret mode.  We saw a lot of people get kind of frustrated that when they held a barre chord or power chord, they’d get all 3 game buttons to light up, instead of the 2 outside buttons of the pattern only. Since fret mode more or less exists to ease the player from playing with a regular guitar controller to playing with a regular guitar, a situation where it’s difficult to hit those gap chords without being pretty careful where your fingers are touching is not helping us meet our goal.

So we changed it!  Since full 3 button chords are relatively rare in-game compared to gap chords, we’ve now made it so that to press those chords, you now have to press down all 6 strings.  Anything less, and the guitar will assume that you want a gap chord and give you that – this means that barre chords across all 6 strings will likely still give you all 3 buttons lit up, but if you make it a bit shorter, you’ll probably wind up with the gap chord you wanted.

Unfortunately, for you expert players out there, this update might make it somewhat harder to hit those 3 button chords, and it doesn’t do anything to help with chords like green/red/blue.  Those ones are a little more complicated in terms of notes being electrically connected by shared frets on the fretboard, so there might not be anything that we can do to make those easier – I’ll have to study it further.

In the meantime, the new code is available in the Binaries folder of the SVN repository on the Google Code site – get the appropriate .hex file for either the USB or the Wii version, depending on what system you’re running your games on.  If you download it, please let us know what you think about the changes, and if they help out or if they’re garbage.

It’s the sort of thing that we’ve been playing with the guitar for a while, and just got used to handling it in certain ways, and, well, just didn’t have the user testing we needed to have had.  Like all developers should know, if you made the product, you’re really in no good position to test it, since you’ve already got these images in your head as to how things are “supposed to be done” – that was like Lesson #1 in the UI design course I took in college (sorry Prof. Alvarado!).  Ironically, that being said, we haven’t really tested out this update, so if you download and play around with the new firmware, let us know how you like it!

Also, if you’re hardcore, the change itself is pretty easy to adjust in the code, so if you’re into messing with source code, grab a snapshot of our SVN and I can tell you where to mess around with this new feature.

Anyhow, thanks to everyone who played at PAX for helping us find this stuff out, and enjoy the new firmware!