unlock.

A friend of mine, CCP, recently showed me the latest PlayStation hit: Guitar Hero. I felt this was a funny game and figured out that there is a similar PC conversion (originating in the demoscene, of course) called Frets on Fire. Now what is this game about? Imagine you’re a rock star, playing rock music on a gamepad/joystick replacement being built into some cheap plastic guitar. Five colored button replace the strings of the guitar, a up/down button simulates hitting the chords. For the PC conversion, you use your keyboard: F1 trough F5 for the strings and ENTER to bend. Interesting, you say, but how is this related to the C64? I can tell you: Some crazy mind called Toni Westbrook had the idea to create a hardware interface to be able to connect one of these plastic guitars to the C64. His project/game is called Shredz64 I felt this was worth mentioning because C64 hardware extensions are always cool.

Toni has a journal page where he reports on the ongoings on the project. Up to the of writing, he already managed to read buttons states and display them on the C64 screens. As far as I know, the hardware interface is more or less finished and he’s now working on implementing a game that support the guitar. As the SID tune lover I am, I imagine this will be very cool. To play SID tunes with a guitar is certainly interesting. I just wonder if Toni has been thinking of the fact that the C64 only has 3 voices. Let’s see what’s going on with this project in the future.

Read Toni’s journal at http://freedomirc.net/~megaboz/shredz64/.