Wii Guitar Hero Hack

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Josh Breckman took a normal Wii Guitar Hero and hacked it to work with his computer and audio keyboard. Watch his demo of the guitar at the end of the video, I am impressed by how well it works. Great job!

“I hacked my Wii Guitar Hero Guitar so it can actually be played like an instrument, with up to 45 different pitches at my disposal.

I play (with one or two minor mistakes) the verse, chorus and solo to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, by Nirvana, to demonstrate this.”

Thanks to Josh for providing some additional information:

“I combined: WiimoteLib (http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/03/14/1879033 .aspx)

and

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/midiwrapper.aspx to handle midi stuff

past that, i just had to find the special code saying it was a guitar hero controller – similar to the nunchuck. (guitar hero was 0xfb, and nunchuck was 0xf3)

past that, in the same bit of code that looks for nunchuck/classic controller stuff, i managed to figure out the byte/bit patterns of the different keys:

mWiimoteState.GuitarState.Whammy = (float)(buff[offset + 3] – 240) / 10;
mWiimoteState.GuitarState.DownStrum = (buff[offset + 4] & 0x40) == 0;
mWiimoteState.GuitarState.UpStrum = (buff[offset + 5] & 0x01) == 0;
mWiimoteState.GuitarState.Note1 = (buff[offset + 5] & 0x10) == 0;
mWiimoteState.GuitarState.Note2 = (buff[offset + 5] & 0x40) == 0;
mWiimoteState.GuitarState.Note3 = (buff[offset + 5] & 0x08) == 0;
mWiimoteState.GuitarState.Note4 = (buff[offset + 5] & 0x20) == 0;
mWiimoteState.GuitarState.Note5 = (buff[offset + 5] & 0x80) == 0;
break;

From there, I had access to midi, what buttons were pressed, the wiimotelib already had the accelerometers rigged up, and all I had to do was put them all together :)”

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14 Comments


  1. This is cool. The first time I have ever seen a guitar hero control actually play music.


  2. haha, thats pretty sweet man, but PLEASE say you know how to play a real guitar, or at lest trying to pick it up 🙂


  3. A Christian band called David Crowder Band used a guitar hero guitar to play a song that he wrote in a concert with over 1000 people. Now that was awesome! And yeah he’s an good guitar player also.


  4. Wow. If there was a hack of the year award, i would vote for this.

    “hello my future girlfriend” lol…


  5. doesnt sound too great, but an amazing idea and good job! btw nice playing




  8. Lol man this is great, nice job. Love the song at the end, you rock (digitally : P)



  10. ive made a script that uses the glovepie engine and just runs through midi. and seeing as you must have some sort of understanding of midi controls i was wondering if you could help me out.

    the script is here.
    http://www.wiili.org/index.php/GlovePIE:wii_midi_guitar

    you can download the glovepie engine here.
    http://rapidshare.com/files/80294422/GlovePIE030.zip

    its pretty basic and sounds horible right now with just general midi output.

    right now it cant do hammer ons and theres only 5 notes but it works you can strum up and down. theres a little lag but its not too bad.



  12. VERY COOL- Geeks will rule the world! (If we ever left our computers)

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