Video game controller to electronic drumset controller

[CSmith]

A friend of mine is student teaching this semester and the school he's at is doing a video game-themed indoor drumline show. So he asked me if it's possible to wire up a game controller(specifically a DDR pad, though if it works with any other controllers, it should work with them too) so that when buttons are pressed on it, the pads on an electronic drumset are triggered.

Is it possible to wire something up like that?

[Kanthos]

It should be possible, but won't necessarily be easy. Try googling around to see who else might have tried this already. If no one has, you'll need a way to plug a controller into your computer (such as finding a DDR controller to USB adapter of some sort), a way to have the computer recognize the events coming from the controller (you might want to look at the source code for a PlayStation emulator for this), and a way to output MIDI data based on the controller input. Then you'd have to route your MIDI output to a program like Battery to generate audio. Unless someone has done this before, it would be a substantial amount of work, and probably wouldn't produce that good results. If PlayStation controllers and DDR controllers are anything like PC joysticks and gamepads, you'll only be able to get press and release events (which would logically correspond to MIDI note on and note off events). You wouldn't get velocity events, so your MIDI data would be played at a uniform volume unless you incorporated some other way to adjust the volume.

Hmm, thought of another possibility. You'd still need some kind of MIDI output software, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a way to treat a PlayStation controller like a normal PC joystick or gamepad. If there is, you wouldn't have to figure about getting PlayStation-style events; you could use DirectX to get PC-style joystick events, and since DirectX pretty much hands you code to do that, it would be easy.

This sounds like a ton of work either way but it's a really neat idea, so I hope it works out for you.

EDIT: Apparantly, this has

with a DDR pad. Unfortunately, I can't find information on *how* it was done.

As an alternative, there's homebrew DS software out there that lets a DS work as a MIDI controller.

[Smoke]

You could just use a PS(2) > USB adapter dealie to get the pad to be recognized as a standard controller, from which the inputs can be converted to MIDI.

http://vellocet.com/software/VMIDIJoY.html

Quick google finds me this, which should help.

Also this might be of help too:

http://createdigitalnoise.com/viewtopic.php?t=147

There's some suggestions for alternative software to achieve a similar goal.

[CSmith]

I use FL Studio so I know about using a joystick as a MIDI controller, but is there any way to set this up without a computer? A MalletKat or an electric bass is about as technological as indoor drumline shows get and he said he would much rather not have a computer in the setup. We just don't know if there is a way to use the raw electric signals from a DDR pad to trigger pads on a drumset(like a Yamaha DTXpress).

I don't know the kids he's working with, but I'm sure his plan is to have them on several pads at some point in the show to play a complex drumset pattern by stepping on the arrows in time.

Maybe the pads can be rigged up inside the outer cover of a DDR pad and they can just step on the drum pad directly, but I'm not sure if they could handle that much weight, since they're designed only to withstand the force of a drumstick. I hope that's not the only solution though.

[suzumebachi]

I'd suggest getting in touch with a EE major that knows his way around MIDI. What you're asking for is not impossible, but it's definitely not gonna be easy either. In order to do it without a computer, you're gonna pretty much have to build a convertor from scratch.

There are guides on the web that tell you how to build a PS2 to USB adapter from scratch, and that would be a good place to start. At least then you could get a feel for how the PS2 controllers work, and if you look up the specifications for MIDI you could maybe figure it out yourself.