First time setup for a Stepmania machine

Hi all

A long long long time ago I used to play a little DDR and naturally gravitated towards Stepmania at some point - I was more just a passing user though rather than a 'power user'.

I'm doing some promotion work for a local community here in Taiwan and their upcoming festival. They're a little-known ethnic group and one of the key elements of their culture is their dance, and they want to be able to share that with people. Their dance is nothing complicated, somewhat akin to a basic line dance, a very easy to follow beat, and with a little creativity could easily be adjusted to a dance on the spot rather than moving around. To that end I've suggested we deploy a dance machine at the festival to help kids learn the steps, powered by Stepmania - the local government loves it and now they want the whole unit to go a national tour before the big day!

The budget is reasonable, so I'm going to be constructing a machine and creating 3 to 5 dances for people to try. To that end I have a number of generic questions (in no particular order) that I hope people can help me with:

1) The plan is to run the setup off of an Ubuntu powered machine (for licensing reasons) - I see this thread from two years back. Has much changed since then, is linux possible/well supported?

2) I'd like to be able to use all 9 sections of the pad if possible when creating the dances, is this possible?

3)Dance pad wise, I'll need two, and they need to be heavy duty pads with good performance. Does anyone have some recommendations on which brand to go for? My reading so far seems to suggest that Omega pads are a good shout.

4)The dances of the community also involve some arm/hand actions. Obviously Stepmania can't cater for that but I'm wondering if I can place video footage in the background of the dances? If so we'll film a dancer doing both the steps and the hand movements for people to see and learn.

5)More for the developers this one - with our roadshow going ahead, Stepmania will be in the spotlight along with the dances we're teaching people, if you'd like any photos/footage let me know! We will of course be making the dances available too, although they'll be so slow I don't think they'll be of any interest to people here!

Thanks in advance everyone!

1) I do all my dev work on Linux, and those instructions were updated just a couple months ago.

2) There isn't currently a game mode that uses 9 buttons. One will have to be added to the engine.

4) Videos in simfiles should work just fine. You just have to put them in the folder and set the start point in edit mode.

1) I do all my dev work on Linux, and those instructions were updated just a couple months ago.

2) There isn't currently a game mode that uses 9 buttons. One will have to be added to the engine.

4) Videos in simfiles should work just fine. You just have to put them in the folder and set the start point in edit mode.

Thanks for such a quick reply Kyzentun. I'll have a bash at getting Stepmania running on Ubuntu soon with your instructions.

With regards to a 9 button game mode, that's a shame but understood! Is there any chance an 8 button mode exists?

The techno game type has an 8 panel mode that uses everything except the center.
How much time do you have before the festival? If it's more than a couple months, it might be possible to add a 9 panel mode in.

Our festival opens on 16th April, but they want to take the machine on the national tour by 22nd March! Too soon for that feature to be added I imagine!

But good news about the 8 panel mode, I'm sure we can make our dances work with that kind of functionality!