Filed under: Gaming, Software, Open Source
Frets on Fire - OSS Guitar Hero Clone
Guitar Hero was a huge hit for the PlayStation 2 console. Using a special guitar shaped controller you could "play" a variety of rock hits, hitting the fret buttons in time to on-screen cues. Well now there's an Open Source cross platform clone of Guitar Hero called Frets on Fire which includes support for OS X. The program was originally designed to be played with a keyboard, but at least with the Windows version, you can use the actual Guitar Hero controller (along with a PlayStation 2 to USB adapter) to play Frets on Fire on the computer. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to determine if the controller also works with the Mac. So anybody out there "jamming" on the Mac with the Guitar controller?[Edit: those of you having trouble on PPC check out this forum thread]
Thanks, Carlo.

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael Herring said 3:48PM on 12-31-2006
This sucker works like a charm on my MacBook Pro, even with a Guitar Hero controller (connected via the Radio Shack PSX to USB adaptor).
Kudos to the Frets on Fire team for a genuinely enjoyable port. The default install even comes with a few good songs!
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andy said 4:11PM on 12-31-2006
Those adapters work on mac! Mine Does!
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Michael Herring said 3:15PM on 12-31-2006
I don't know why I haven't gotten a confirmation email from this goofball comment system yet, but I thought I'd add that the keyboard decor in the background while playing Frets on Fire is a Mac keyboard (there are 'option' and 'command' keys on it). I wonder if that's present in the Linux/Windows versions. :)
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Michael Herring said 3:17PM on 12-31-2006
Wow, so that was my second attempt out of five to post a comment. I tried to add that yes, the Guitar Hero controller does work with the Mac version of Frets on Fire.
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Craig McCreath said 4:28PM on 12-31-2006
I seems that every single time I play it, it crashes - saying that there is 'no module named traceback'...
From what people are saying it only seems to work on intels, so no good for those PPC mac owners still out there like me.
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Paul said 5:40PM on 12-31-2006
Yeah, it keeps crashing on my Mac too. It's a 1.42 Ghz PPC Mac mini.
I want to play this so badly too...
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John Russell said 8:50PM on 12-31-2006
It only crashed when I tried to change the settings so that it would take up my full 20" screen; I rebooted and it was fine.
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Ahmad said 2:13PM on 1-01-2007
It seems the website isn't loading anymore
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Pete said 6:58PM on 1-01-2007
Now this is a little weird. It's not working on my Pentium 4 as well... it's a Radeon 9800 Pro... can't find the GameEngine.py or something. I tried redownloading and unzipping, same thing. This is sad.
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