Hacking Guitar Hero

I'm going to just keep updating this post so that all the "hacking" stuff stays together.

Travis borrowed a hacked copy of Guitar Hero from a friend who is on a two week vacation. We plugged it and and got it to work! Basically, the hacked copy means that there are new songs on the game that regular GH-lovers have programmed the notes for. For example, somebody wanted to see Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" on GH, so they got the song and programmed it with INSANE notes! I think I make it about 2% of the way through the song.

Chris did some research and found out how to do it, so we planning on doing a mod to my PS2 so that we can play our own hacked GH. In fact, we found instructions on how to do the programming too, so I think we're going to try to make our own songs! Now I just need to make a songlist of which songs I want to convert to GH format. This is gonna be awesome!!

Once I start doing it, I will post the progress regarding how I did it and how well it worked. I'm hoping it's easy because I'm not super-techy. Now I just have to find the time!!

Update:
Apparently there are two ways to mod a Playstation. You can sauter a chip into it, but it sounds very difficult if you don't have experience with sautering OR you can use a network adapter. I already have a network adapter, so this is the method we're using. This method works best with the old, fatter PS2s because you need to add a hard drive inside the console which will not fit in the newer, slim PS2s.

I think the basic idea of the hacking is that once you put a hard drive into your PS2, you will upload Guitar Hero to it and then replace some of the files with the "new" music/notes files. When you start up the game, the copy we have shows all the "normal" songs from GH2, but when you pick them, they have the alternate music/notes on them. On the copy we have, instead of "Shout at the Devil," we have Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." Some people programmed in multiple levels (medium and expert), some didn't. Some of the songs stall out and crash, some work just fine. Some of the notes are synced up properly, but I think that's more of a tweaking thing that will come later.

Here's what I've done so far:
1. I have a network adapter attached to the back of my old, fat Playstation2.
2. My computer guy gave me a 20G hard drive and an ethernet cable. Now I just need to figure out how to install it.