This will be my final dealing witht the Rock Band drums on Windows. In the last post I said I was going to make a GlovePIE script, but it seems I have been beaten to the punch. You'll find the script in the description of the linked video and I can confirm that it works with the 360 drum kit.
Here's a simple little program I whipped up to use the Rock Bad drums as a MIDI controller. I'll have a video up sometime later. NOTE - You'll need the .NET 2.0 Framework.
Note: I'm not providing any support for this program. It's up for those who want a MIDI solution.
EDIT: Since it appears my program is complete crap, I now redirect you to somebody who's developed a much better piece of software (and probably spent much longer than fifteen minutes developing it). Enjoy!
Everything I had posted here before is now outdated (and more than likely was when I came up with this). The latest Xinput driver from Microsoft supports the Harmonix controllers out of the box (people who think I'm fake probably already had this). You can get the 32-bit version here and the 64-bit version here.
Be sure to check out Andrew Rudson's Drum Machine
Answers to common questions:
Does this work for PS2 or PS3 controllers?
No. This driver is for Xbox 360 compliant controllers. Seeing as I don't have either of those, I don't know their level of support.
Do the Xbox 360 work on the PS3/PS2 version (or vica versa)
More than likely not, but once again I don't have anything to test it out with.
You're not a hacker. I plugged mine in and it just worked.
Not really a question, but:
A) I had old drivers when I did this (Nov '07). The old drivers didn't support anything outside of Microsoft Xbox 360 controllers. The newer drivers have been rewritten to support third party contrllers.
B) Hacker is (or was) a synonym for programmer, so once again, you're wrong.
I have a problem with my computer. Can you fix it?
Being a full-time college student I don't have time to attend to every little problem. There's an internet full of willing people who are much smarter than I and have far more time.
No time? But you made this! You obviously have no life!
I made this in half an hour (video included). And it was over Thanksgiving break at that. You, my fine sir, troll the internet telling people they have no life when it is in fact you that have no life. Seriously, go and get yourself a girlfriend. Once again, you lose.
Okay, enough poking fun at people. I hope this brings all the confusion and chaos to a close.
I've been holding out on this news for quite some time now, but since everything seems to be falling into place like a well played game of Tetris I will let all the cats and their friends out of the preverbial bag.
First, and most importantly, I have finally gotten my GED. I will brag a little and post my scores:
Reading - 96%
Writing - 82%
Math - 99%
Science - 95%
Social Studies - 99%
Now those little percentages are how many people taking the GED in US are stupider than me, to put it not so nicely. Rather surprising, really, because I found the test to be incredibly simple. IMO, my essay did suck pretty bad. I was supposed to write about how I expected to be remembered which was kind of a lame topic to begin with. I am, usually, a fairly concise writer so coming up with 25 sentences on this topics was really, really hard. In the end I kind of wandered off topic talking about something else completely, but I had about 5 minutes to come up with an extra paragraph so I expanded on something I'd touched on earlier. It sucked, trust me.
Since I have now hurdled hugh school the next logical step is college. Funny thing is that was lined up before my GED was. I have been accepted at Full Sail's school of awesomeness and will be taking the Digital Arts and Design degree. This means I will have to relocate myself to sunny Florida. Do I mind? Hell, no. Do my parents mind? I don't think so. Does everybody else mind even though it really isn't their business? Yes. I've gotten more "why would you move to Florida" comments than I care to count. But, that aside, I'm going to be attending the "behind the scenes" tour this weekend so I'll have plenty to blog about whilst I'm there or when I get back. And don't worry, there'll be pictures and maybe some video.
Speaking of video, I'm going to be making another faux commercial. I've got the script ready, all I need to do is film, write some music, make some visuals, cut it all together in iMovie HD and put it up on YouTube.
Speaking of music, Chris got his electric guitar Monday and has been teaching himself to play (as have the rest of us). I will say this much: playing guitar is a bitch. I thought the piano was bad. At least it's pasture is much more spacous. Chris seems to be concentrating mostly on memorizing chords while I went and taught myself how to read tablatures and am trying to play stuff that's way out of my league (in my defense, however, I can play the first three notes of "Sweet Child O Mine").
And, speaking of iMovie, I kind of moved away from OS X. I'd been using it exclusively for quite some time and then Photoshop died. So I decided I'd redownload it for Windows (I'm a bastard that way) and I haven't really booted out of it since except to copy some files. I've finally gotten more or less used to Vista. The interface, IMO, is more complicated now than it had been (especially the network dialogs). So I am, once again, a Windows man.
Well, I believe that shall tide the masses over at least until the weekend. Keep coming back as I will be blogging down in Florida (assuming our hotel has complimentary G, but it looks grim at this point). We shall see... we shall see...
As you may or may not know I am currently the owner of a new Mac Mini (Core Duo FTW!). Despite the fact that Windows is easily installed thanks to the magic of Boot Camp, I've been working in OS X mostly. I feel I've been using it long enough to give my opinion:
Pros
- Easy to use. Once I figured out the basics I pretty much got it.
- Stability (for the most part). A few minutes ago Safari died an ugly death on me dragging the rest of the system down with it and I've been in a must reboot situation twice (not including the system updates)
- Pretty looking. Hey, what can I say? I'm a sucker for the genie effect.
Cons
- Apple's interface guidlines tend to make apps overly simplistic. Toolbars are almost non-existant, everything seems to revolve around a drag and drop interface. This is an area where Windows apps can really shine given a developer who knows what they are doing.
- Keyboard craziness. I don't know about you, but I use the Home and End keys to navigate through text boxes all the time. Albiet, it's still there (Cmd-Left and Right respectively), but pressing two keys (or three if I want to make a selection) is a lot harder. Also, they seemed to ignore the delete key as well. I'm not a mouse person and I don't want to drag my effin' files to the trash. I want to press delete (and Enter to close the resulting dialog box).
- Unix directory structure. Windows can be incredibly clean in directory structure if done right. Unix is much, much more difficult and half the folders you can't see anyways. Also, mountpoints drive me nuts (although, OS X seems to keep track of all that fairly well).
- Finally, hardware support. They tell you "it just works" but that's a lie. There are no drivers for my scanner (forcing me to use a piece of shareware), minimal support for my printer, NO support for my flash drive just to name a few. Driver support is something people complain about in Windows, but I have never, EVER had a problem with hardware in XP.
So, now that I'm through with that I'll deliver my verdict: Windows XP SP2 is the best OS ever (and I've used Vista so I can rule that one out). That said, OS X is definitely the best flavor of Unix I've ever seen and I can get along with it nicely.
...and sucks, at the same time!
Yesterday I thought it would be "fun" to test drive the beta of Microsoft's latest and "greatest" OS, Windows Vista. Hah! It's slow, it's incomplete and it gives Windows a bad name (wait....). And even worse, when I went to install XP again the Vista file permissions and junk remained so nothing worked. So I had to back my crud up, reformat my hard drive and start from scratch. As of this moment I'm running without SP2 which is probably suicide :-P.
In work related news, I moved up again. A couple days ago I helped to resolve a rather sticky customer situation and the manager's were so impressed that I've been offered to be promoted to support manager. This would give me the option of moving back to days which would thrill me to no end. However, having nothing but gripey customers and employees to look forward to would be like belly flopping into the bowls of hell. So I'm still thinking about it. I did get some good news in my current job. Michael Jordan (no relation to the basketball player) is getting his hours changed so I won't be alone in the back which will be nice. It'll actually be possible to get everything done.
Well, I need to go upstairs and get SP2 installing (stupid butthead needs to be plugged in :-P). Until next time, happy April Fools :-)
Well, yesterday was a great day... NOT! Somehow, and I've yet been able to figure out why, my password got reset. Now I figure it's one of four scenerios:
A) A little kid somehow changed the password by pounding on my keyboard
B) One of our neighbors has been sitting cracking our WPA passkey the last month (and I think that all of our neighbors have WiFi)
C) Some Uber h4x0r who's peed off at me snuck in via the internet and changed it hoping to make my life miserable
D) My SAM file got corrupted
D is the most likely scenerio, but you can't discount any of the others. Anyhoo, I spent most of yesterday figuring out how to undo it without reinstalling Windows. My first thought was to try the Linux distro austrumi which has a utility called nt_pass (only in version 0.9.2, btw). Well, that didn't want to work because, gosh, my SAM file is read-only. Well what jerk wrote that program? :-P
So, I went and did some more searching and came across a little hole in the Windows Istaller. Here's how it works:
A) You'll need a Windows XP/2003 CD (any flavor: plain, SP1 or SP2) that's bootable (I 'spect most have this kind)
B) Boot with that and get to the point where you can repair a Windows install (Enter, Enter, F8, R I believe is the key sequence)
C) Just go along with that. Your computer will reboot and start the second half of the install.
D) Be paying atention to the progress bar in the lower left of the screen. When I says "Install Devices" hit F10. You'll be greeted by a command prompt which will allow you to do darn near anything you want.
E) In this particular case run the command "control userpasswords2" and a friendly box will come up where you can reset passwords, add users, etc.
F) Once you've done whatever it is you're going to do let Windows finish installing or you'll lose everything you just did.
Needless to say that I created myself a new user account so I could leave the Aministrator one alone ('tis one of the drawbacks to 2K3. You have to go using the command prompt just to get to a place to add a user :-P). But now I'm back in business and everything works great. I hope somebody out there finds that useful because it sure was to me.