StepMania with a Dance Pad Adapter
I spoke of how I had discovered StepMania back in November 2017. I bought a PS2 to USB adapter online, and I had high hopes that it would allow me to play with my dance pad. Admittedly, I’m a little late on the followup, but I did finally try to use the USB adapter with the game.
Shipping from an obscure little company in China obviously takes a while, so I didn’t get in any hurry waiting for my package. It took a few weeks, but the adapter finally came in. I told myself I would try it out, but I sat it aside and didn’t get around to it for a while. And by “a while,” I mean about 5 months. Things came up, I forgot about the adapter, and I just never got back to it.
Finally, in March 2018, a friend came up and asked if I had ever gotten to try it out. I obviously had not, but we decided to hook it up. I expected there would be some configuration, so I was prepared for some setup time. With a black belt in Google-fu, there are very few general tech issues that I can’t solve with some research.
While tinkering with the controller settings, the indicator for button 13 flashed constantly. Even without any buttons pressed, the settings screen seemed to read that one button was constantly sending input. I wondered if perhaps my dance pad was faulty from several years in storage. As old as it was, I wouldn’t be surprised if the wires might cause some sort of ghost input. Still, the lights on the dance pad itself came on whenever buttons were physically pressed, so it looked as though everything was working right on that end.
After some searching through the StepMania forums, I discovered that PS2 to USB adapters do not work for dance pads. Something about being intended for Dualshock 2 controllers, and rejecting analog input. Several users confirmed that the adapter would not work. The dance pad might still work, but the conversion from PS2 controller port to USB meant that I would not be able to use it with my laptop to play StepMania.
I was certainly disappointed, but not entirely surprised. Going into this endeavor, I knew it was a gamble. On the bright side, I did confirm that StepMania works much like DDR from a software perspective, and I had a large collection of Stepfiles to play all of the songs I loved from the DDR games that I owned.
Back to square one, it seems my only option now if I want to play Stepmania with a dance pad is to buy a USB pad online. Amazon has some options for as cheap as $22, which is honestly quite reasonable. I may eventually buy one, since that seems to have a much better chance of working as intended with StepMania. For now, though, I’ll give the dance game mission a rest. I’m much more interested in buying a Raspberry Pi and setting up RetroPie at the moment, and I genuinely feel like I would get more entertainment out of playing old NES, SNES, and N64 games. If/when I do decide to get a USB dance mat, I’ll be sure to make a blog post about it in a <sarcasm> timely </sarcasm> fashion.
Shipping from an obscure little company in China obviously takes a while, so I didn’t get in any hurry waiting for my package. It took a few weeks, but the adapter finally came in. I told myself I would try it out, but I sat it aside and didn’t get around to it for a while. And by “a while,” I mean about 5 months. Things came up, I forgot about the adapter, and I just never got back to it.
Finally, in March 2018, a friend came up and asked if I had ever gotten to try it out. I obviously had not, but we decided to hook it up. I expected there would be some configuration, so I was prepared for some setup time. With a black belt in Google-fu, there are very few general tech issues that I can’t solve with some research.
While tinkering with the controller settings, the indicator for button 13 flashed constantly. Even without any buttons pressed, the settings screen seemed to read that one button was constantly sending input. I wondered if perhaps my dance pad was faulty from several years in storage. As old as it was, I wouldn’t be surprised if the wires might cause some sort of ghost input. Still, the lights on the dance pad itself came on whenever buttons were physically pressed, so it looked as though everything was working right on that end.
After some searching through the StepMania forums, I discovered that PS2 to USB adapters do not work for dance pads. Something about being intended for Dualshock 2 controllers, and rejecting analog input. Several users confirmed that the adapter would not work. The dance pad might still work, but the conversion from PS2 controller port to USB meant that I would not be able to use it with my laptop to play StepMania.
I was certainly disappointed, but not entirely surprised. Going into this endeavor, I knew it was a gamble. On the bright side, I did confirm that StepMania works much like DDR from a software perspective, and I had a large collection of Stepfiles to play all of the songs I loved from the DDR games that I owned.
Back to square one, it seems my only option now if I want to play Stepmania with a dance pad is to buy a USB pad online. Amazon has some options for as cheap as $22, which is honestly quite reasonable. I may eventually buy one, since that seems to have a much better chance of working as intended with StepMania. For now, though, I’ll give the dance game mission a rest. I’m much more interested in buying a Raspberry Pi and setting up RetroPie at the moment, and I genuinely feel like I would get more entertainment out of playing old NES, SNES, and N64 games. If/when I do decide to get a USB dance mat, I’ll be sure to make a blog post about it in a <sarcasm> timely </sarcasm> fashion.
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