Yesterday, I wrote about the PC side of things, so today, I'll try and explain the game side of the project.

I own a Xbox 360 (you can see my HDMI mod in the photo!), and play Guitar Hero III and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, and tomorrow, I'll have Guitar Hero: World Tour (yay!), but will be concentrating on GH3 and GH:A since I'm familiar with them. (I also own Guitar Hero: On Tour for my Nintendo DS, but we won't worry about it here)

I plan to pull apart my Playstation 2 Dualshock 2 controller to act as the interface between the Xbox 360 and my PC. Did you read that correctly? Yes, a PS2 controller on my 360. Let me explain...

First off, I needed decide whether I should pull apart my GH3 Les Paul guitar controller or use a standard Xbox 360 controller. The choice was pretty simple - go with the standard controller. Mainly because the standard controller is cheaper, but more importantly, when you play with the standard controller, you don't need to strum. So there's less timing to worry about - the robot will only need to press the buttons at the right time, and not have to worry about strumming in time as well.

I looked around, but a wired controller is pretty hard to come by, and they are expensive. I happen to have a Max Shooter for the Xbox 360, that I bought to give me autofire capability in annoying games that require button mashing (eg Fable II Pub Games, Eternal Sonata). Max Shooter also lets me use a PS2 controller on the 360, and PS2 controllers are dirt cheap, less than US$10. I also have a PS2 controller that I haven't used in a long time, so it was time to blow off the cobwebs and put it to good use.

Just to make sure that the PS2 controller can be used to play Guitar Hero (before I pull it apart), I fired up GH:A and played a song with the PS2 controller through Max Shooter and it worked perfectly. Here are the PS2 button mappings to the Les Paul guitar controller:

PS2---------------------------->Les Paul
L2 ----------------------------->Green
L1 ----------------------------->Red
R1 ----------------------------->Yellow
R2 ----------------------------->Blue
X ------------------------------>Orange
any direction on DPad--->Star Power
left analogue------------->whammy

I'll pull apart the PS2 controller for my next post, although with GH:WT arriving tomorrow, not sure when I'll be around next to update this blog :)