Guitar Hero 2 +++ mod for PS2 (also GH1++)

What's up guys. Been a damn while since I've posted anything significantly here. Hell, some of you probably don't even really know who I am.

After becoming inactive in the Sonic community, I went through a bit of turmoil IRL and once that settled down, I gravitated towards the Guitar Hero community.

Well, as with my early days in the Sonic community, I became known as an early hacker of GH2, when custom songs were first becoming a thing.

Over the years, I continued to hack on GH2 while everyone else went to GH3PC for customs.

As a result, I'm now considered one of the top, if not the top, GH2 hackers in the world.

This is the result of the work I've done. I call it "Guitar Hero 2 +++". Why three pluses? Because this is the third time I've added new features to GH2 and released an ISO.

New features:
Focus Mode (black background behind the fretboard)
Neckless Mode (basically for top level players who memorize note charts, but instead of removing the entire HUD like Performance Mode, Neckless mode just removes the fretboard)
Roxbury Mode (a leftover dev cheat used for beatmap verification that I turned into a normal cheat code)
"Toogle Bot" for either/both players (enables the built-in autoplayer, good for demonstrating a chart, also the "toogle" spelling is intentional)
Speed modification codes (increments of 5%, 10%, or 25%, ranges from 5%-595%)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO3EMY7Rkv0

I've also done similar work with GH1, which I call GH1++. The first + indicates the original GH1 mod I did, which added two "hidden" songs back to the setlist, that were present in the files but not accessible without hacking/cheat devices. The second + indicates the presence of the same speed mod from GH2+++ as well as the ability to "toogle" the bot for both players.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl1E4jAkhvs

 

We call the BPM/timesig syncing beatmapping, yes. Not the whole chart. Just the process of syncing up the beat lines. It's also sometimes called "tempo mapping".

I've been part of the GH community since 2006 and the term has been around since the early customs days. Don't really see a problem with it, since it perfectly describes the process.

The code in question was used for visually testing whether a chart was accurately beatmapped. Think about the connection to the word "Roxbury" and you'll have an idea of what it does. I also have a separate video on my Youtube from probably 2016 showing it.

 

Lemme guess, you're referring to osu! players? I noticed when looking up the term "beatmap" on Google that the overwhelming majority of results were related to osu!.

Not at all. GH3 was developed by a completely different team at Neversoft, and originated as a fork of the Tony Hawk game that was in development at the time. I like to call GH3 a "beatmatching engine bolted onto a skating engine". GH3 tried to do a lot of things like GH2 on the surface, but under the hood it's completely different.

 

I enjoy GH3, don't get me wrong. But the HMX engine, to me, is objectively a more robust engine. For example, it doesn't fall apart at a different frame rate than 60fps (at least in experiments with PCSX2).