Special Feature: Guitar Hero in PCSX2 (WIP)

This entry is about one of my all-time favs, Guitar Hero. It was the single reason for me to buy a PS2. So when I found out that recent versions of PCSX2 support the original Guitar Hero controller, all my focus was on this wonderful achievement of emulation. As of this writing, I have sufficiently confident emulation running on Apple Silicon, so let's summarize the experience. Work in progress.

For a long time, those were my only PS2 games - believe it or not.

 
On the software side, all you need is a nightly build of PCSX2: https://pcsx2.net/ - it is still Intel only, but works very nicely on Apple Silicon machines as well. The app comes with a nice updater, which in the case of nighly builds provides you with daily updates, and those are mostly smooth.

On the hardware side, the Guitar Hero Controller is a must. Of course there are nerds playing the games with regular joypads, but that's really not the point of these games.

Only with these ridiculous controllers, the game feels right
(apologies for the Lightning cable hanging into the picture)

You will also need a PS2 to USB adapter, such as this one I bought: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08K4PZBDM?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details - so far it works for me both in MacOS and under Windows 11.

As always, the main point of this post is to provide quite important information about a proper configuration of the emulation.

Configuration of the guitar controller is somewhat tricky

In the PCSX2 controller settings, you must switch your controller from DualShock2 to Guitar. Then under both MacOS and Windows11, the problems start.

MacOS: For whatever reason, manual bindings provide no reliable result. The only way I achieved a proper binding was the Automatic Mapping function - and the guitar works miraculously. Don't ask me why the manual binding fails.

Windows11: No reliable result with PCSX2 alone. Instead, I had to install the ds4windows software (https://ds4-windows.com/) plus the PS3 driver add-on (https://github.com/nefarius/DsHidMini - put into ds4-windows mode). With this additional software up and running, the Guitar Controller also behaves well under Windows11. Compared to MacOS, I could not identify any better emulation under Windows11 (that was the main point for me looking into Windows11 on a gaming PC).

Tilt works! Raising the Guitar Controllers to activate Star Power - one of the most important features for obtaining a serious score - works just fine. So there is no need to assign a macro to Tilt or to otherwise change the default configuration provided by Automatic Mapping. Also don't mess around with the deadzone or the sensitivity of the whammy bar - it just worsens things. 

Latency is your biggest enemy

Only with a 100% functional Guitar Controller, you can head for the next challenge, which is to get rid of the input lag. If you played seriously on the PS2, you'll know that the first Guitar Hero game did not have any input lag correction option, so you had to deal with a certain latency.

The good news: In PCSX2, it seems that you can get rid of latency quite effectively.

Recommended settings (still under testing, but so far nice results):

- Output Latency: minimal

- Synchronization: Time Stretch (to get video and audio in sync)

- Target Latency (Guitar Hero 1): 37 ms, thus resulting in a total latency of 40 ms; if this is too low, sound will crackle

This average latency seems to work quite well for me - in the sense that the notes and the music fit together with your strums, but the sound does not crackle

With these special Audio settings, try your luck and enjoy Guitar Hero on your modern Mac!

Guitar Hero 1 runs well enough, the widescreen patch adds content on both sides, some glitches are documented in the PCSX2 wiki, e.g. bad numbers in the score.

Based on this setup, I currently really enjoy going back to these wonderful songs in the game. Please stay tuned for further information, should I encounter further insights. Good luck and Rock On!