PS3: Guitar Hero III and Rock Band Controllers incompatible; my project to resolve issue.
May0
To the dismay of many PS3 owners, the Guitar Hero III and Rock Band guitar controllers are incompatible with each other. You can read more about that here, here, and here. There is a patch available, but Sony can’t release it because the makers of GHIII and RB can’t come to an agreement. You can buy a secondary controller for each game, but that is a costly solution. There are other alternatives with third party controllers as well, but they feel cheap and its just not the same.
Well, this got me thinking. Why not just “spoof” the guitar controller and make the PS3 think the GHIII guitar is a RB guitar (and vice versa)? If you plug the GHIII or RB guitars into your PC, they are recognized as game controllers because they implement the standard USB HID (Human Interface Device). For a quick USB overview, you can check out beyondlogic’s “USB in a nutshell” for more information.
Time to put my Computer Engineering and Computer Science education to work.
My plan is to plug the guitar into a micro controller that emulates a USB host, which modifies the USB Vendor ID and Device ID (and remaps keys if necessary), then pass the modified data out a USB slave port that is connected to the PS3. Essentially, the cabling will be something like this:
RB Guitar –> RB Dongle USB –> Microcontroller ((spoof Vendor ID, Device ID, remap keys)) –> PS3
To make this simpler, I’m intending to use the Atmel ATMega128 and the AVR-USB (a firmware only USB driver for AVR microcontrollers). I’ll be using the USB HIDtool to determine the capabilities of each guitar HID and try to emulate them.
Step 1 will be to get my ATmega128 board working. We used this microcontroller in college and in our current designs at work for low-level control so i’m pretty familiar with the ins-and-outs of it.
I’ll update you on the progress… stay tuned for further posts!
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1:46am on May 26th, 2008
This definitely sounds like an awesome idea, and I’ll be bookmarking this website to check up on any updates.
One thing that might put a hamper on your plan; with the extra connection/remapping, there may be an extra lag that may make the game unplayable. It’s not that I don’t want this to work out, just something to keep in mind when you’re working on it
Thomas says: I’m sure there will be hardware lag associated with the device, but how much remains to be seen. The initial hardware will run at 16MHz. I believe this is OK (and decent enough for playing) for now since the GH3 and RB guitars are not high speed USB devices.
7:29am on June 23rd, 2008
Any progress – I’m very keen to follow this project! Good luck.
Thomas says: Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to work on this project. I’ve been keeping busy on work related hardware designs. I have the hardware ready for testing, but not the firmware.