I recently discovered Frets on Fire, an open source game very similar to the Guitar Hero games. Guitar Hero is one of those games I’ve never owned, but always looked longingly at — I’m just not ready to commit to a gaming console. But oooh, I want to play!
Frets on Fire appears to solve that problem. I think.
I’ve played for about 15 minutes (even did the tutorial). Need more songs! I downloaded a few from one of the forums but exactly none of them worked (I must be doing something seriously dumb). I then realized that it could import from the Guitar Hero games, so I decided to import songs from the PS2 Guitar Hero 2 DVD that was laying around. (don’t ask)
That led me to realize today was the day to finally install the DVD-ROM drive I’ve had sitting on my desk for over a month.
That helped me discover that I’m out of power leads in my case.
That caused me to rethink drives and fans since I couldn’t find a 5V splitter (I blush).
So, 2 hours later… the drive is in, the import of GH2 songs has begun. Some back of the napkin calculations tell me that this will take over 24 hours! Man, someday I really need to upgrade my computer. This is a bit silly…
I want the songs though, so I’m just going to let it trundle along and work from other computers for a bit. I did take the precaution of aiming some extra desk fans at the case as I’m a bit nervous of over 24 hours of 100% CPU heat.
Any tips on where to get songs or perhaps what I was doing wrong initially?
I’ll conclude with a features list from the About page:
- Unique inverted keyboard gameplay style
- Support for guitar controllers and generic joysticks
- Includes a song editor for making your own tunes
- Compete with others on the World Charts
- Hundreds of songs composed by the community
- Supports importing Guitar Hero™ I and Guitar Hero™ II songs
- Multiplatform; runs on Windows™, Linux®, Mac OS X™ and FreeBSD®
- Open source, full Python source code available
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42 comments
cesar says:
June 9, 2007 at 7:59 pm (UTC -7 )
Maybe the only wrong thing was choosing Frets on Fire. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but last time I tried it, it was slow as hell in a Athlon 3000+, 1 gb, ati x1300 computer. So if it takes 24 hours to rip, playing would be almost impossible.
Being an avid guitar hero player, I needed more songs, but after a frets on fire try, I felt depressed.
Maybe they could use Stepmania graphic engine to speed it a bit?
I hope you can try it, and works faster. Try getting songs from http://www.fofspain.com/fofspain/ , a very active Spanish comunity.
Chris says:
June 9, 2007 at 8:56 pm (UTC -7 )
Uh oh. I’m on a Athlon 2600+ barton, 1.5GB and nvidia 6800 GT.
You’re scaring me!
Thanks for the tip on the fofspain.com site. I’ll be sure to give it a shot. I can’t stop my GH import right now though – it’s doing YYZ by Rush!
Chris says:
June 9, 2007 at 10:15 pm (UTC -7 )
Sidenote: I killed the import after 5 hours and 13 songs.
gyoza says:
June 15, 2007 at 4:32 am (UTC -7 )
Re: problems importing songs
you need to run the appe.bat file included with most songs/packs. keyboardsonfire.net has a tutorial on how to do this in their faq.
Re: Performance
it starts off with the settings for the ASM06 competition machine. You can optimize it for your machine, but keep in mind syncing audio and video so precisely requires a very high priority, so those of you with slower processors or less than 512mb ram really need to kill all background tasks to make FoF playable. The latest version has an included ‘light graphics’ mod, and lowering the frame rate from the default 80 to 60 or less (depending on your tolerance for such things. I have mine at 30 on an athlon 2400+ and no problems outside of minor non-game-ruining stutter). you can also lower the sample quality to 22050 (i don’t recommend reducing the bitrate, it sounds like AM radio).
Frets on fire is open source, and less than a year since initial release, and many enhancements and innovations have been added in that short time, and rest assured as long as guitar hero is popular, there will be continued development in one form or another. It took Stepmania a full 2 years to get up to full DDR replacement; with time, FoF will get whammy bar support, easier song management, and many interface and gameplay mods. Plus swinging around an old IBM keyboard to a rock cover of the Ninja Gaiden opening theme is possibly the most supremely geeky thing you could ever do.
Chris says:
June 15, 2007 at 8:42 pm (UTC -7 )
Curious. Maybe I had some bogus downloads.
The GH2 import was what really clobbered my little computer. The ones that I got imported work great though.
somebody says:
June 18, 2007 at 8:54 pm (UTC -7 )
They have 2 torrents from fofspain.com that have all the guitar hero 2 songs (and 1 if you can find them) . Each torrent takes about 1-2 hours to download, even on this outdated computer I’m on. 1Ghz processor, NVidia GeForce MX 440
somebody says:
June 18, 2007 at 8:55 pm (UTC -7 )
Oops, and 512 MB memory
Chris says:
June 18, 2007 at 10:53 pm (UTC -7 )
@”somebody” – the suggestion to check for those torrents is a great idea. Thank you.
Out of curiosity, how does FoF run on that computer?
Kbot says:
June 25, 2007 at 5:35 am (UTC -7 )
once you download songs via torrent,
extract them into:
C:\Program Files\Frets on Fire\data\songs
(or where ever you have installed FoF)
then run appe.bat
now when you open FoF the songs should appear
if you encounter silence when you miss a note when playing FoF then run appe.bat again to fix.
I’m on a 2.8 celeron + 512ram and gameplay can be pretty staggered. Always runs smoother after a restart but is still get really frustrated at how slow and clunky this game can be. I am looking forward to checking it out on a machine w better specs.
Keep in mind some songs suck (poor sync w song). there is a forum floating around somewhere that discusses the best FoF songs.
good luck & don’t let FoF put you off – the Guitar Hero series is unbelievable!
Teren says:
June 29, 2007 at 7:18 pm (UTC -7 )
I’m running a 1 gig ram AMD Turion 64 Compaq Presario v6000. You would think FoF would work however, it is relatively slow and the music staggers. It may have something to do with Vista but when I put the game on my XP the computer was too slow to handle it. Any suggestions on how to speed it up or should I just go out and buy Guitar Hero?
Chris says:
June 30, 2007 at 8:30 am (UTC -7 )
Fortunately for me, gameplay is *very* smooth on my 2600+ with 1.5GB. The only issues I had were related to the slow GH imports (solved via torrent…).
Teren, I’m not sure what I’d suggest beyond checking out the FoF forums for tuning help. Seems like your machine should outperform mine, at any rate.
Zach says:
July 1, 2007 at 7:59 pm (UTC -7 )
uuhhh..Can i download the Guitar Hero songs without using torrents? I don’t really use torrents.
Kevin says:
July 14, 2007 at 12:52 pm (UTC -7 )
I have a problem it goes realy slow how can i make it go normal speed
GARY says:
July 22, 2007 at 3:05 pm (UTC -7 )
hey guys…well when i download a torrent file, it comes up as like an internet file. What should i do?
Chris says:
July 23, 2007 at 6:44 pm (UTC -7 )
@Kevin – you might have better luck at one of the FoF forums. I believe I linked to one of them in the original article?
@Gary – get a torrent client! (google is your friend)
Farwando says:
July 26, 2007 at 6:50 pm (UTC -7 )
ive had FoF for about a month now and it has been running smoothly playing FoF 1.384 with RF-Mod. and using the Noob-Edition mod which helped with the lag but about a week ago it started experiencing lag that wasnt there before. i tried tampering with the graphical settings for a while now but it still wont go back to its kick-ass ways i think my computer is nothing special but i think its capable of running this game with no problem, anyone ideas will be appreciated.
im running a core-2 duo 2.00 ghz each
3 gigs of ram
geforce 7500 LE(i think may be the problem but who nows)
throwing_cards says:
August 11, 2007 at 9:11 pm (UTC -7 )
The reason(s) the songs you downloaded weren’t running were:
You didn’t unzip them to the frets on fire/data/songs directory.
or
You downloaded “frets only” versions.
-J
Chris says:
August 14, 2007 at 10:37 pm (UTC -7 )
-J,
In hindsite, it might have been the “frets only” thing…. thanks!
Lutzer says:
August 17, 2007 at 3:26 am (UTC -7 )
I had the same problem with the lag. Then i changed my desktop resolution from 16 bits to 32 bits and the problems seem to be gone. Hope this helps !
Chris says:
August 17, 2007 at 10:20 pm (UTC -7 )
Thanks for sharing that, Lutzer. How odd that raising color depth sped it up!
Kevin says:
September 7, 2007 at 7:43 am (UTC -7 )
Not really, A lot of video cards seem to hate lower color depths in openGL video modes
Chris says:
September 7, 2007 at 7:54 am (UTC -7 )
Thanks Kevin, that’s something to remember.
Name (required) says:
October 12, 2007 at 12:12 am (UTC -7 )
FYI: The game is quite playable with our media box, that has only Sempron 2600+ / 512MB RAM and ATI Radeon 9550. Oh and the HDD is some old PATA 40GB drive..
There is something seriously wrong with your systems if you can’t play the game on faster set than this.
Dragu says:
October 15, 2007 at 2:56 pm (UTC -7 )
The talk about Frets on Fire being slow on high-end machines is FUD. Those who had the problem probably just had their video settings on the wrong color depth, which causes puts needless strain on the graphics card. I’m running Frets on Fire on an AMD64 Athlon64 3000+ with 1GB of RAM and an old Nvidia 6600, works like a charm. All you need is a decent post-2000 graphics card, not some integrated laptop thingy.
About the songs; either you downloaded some of the “frets only” releases which include a file that clearly states that they only include the game files, not the song for copyright reasons. The other songs are all ready to be played. You are to extract them to /data/songs/. We also have a thread describing this in detail: http://www.keyboardsonfire.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=300
ooo says:
November 8, 2007 at 5:02 pm (UTC -7 )
here just use this youtube link for a tutorial on more songs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhBKuFb0x0c
themattman says:
November 10, 2007 at 8:12 pm (UTC -7 )
i agree with dragu, it works fine for me and im running a 1.66ghz 512mb of ram windows xp machine
karmaeasy says:
November 12, 2007 at 4:53 pm (UTC -7 )
the 16 bits to 32 bits works for me ty ::)
Josh says:
November 15, 2007 at 11:27 pm (UTC -7 )
WOO HOO!!! Thanks everyone ! I was getting really bad frame rates, so i tryed switching from desktop from 16 bit to 32 bit, bam runs so fast and smooth THANK YOU !!!
Amd Athlon Thunderbird 1.3 ghz
1256 Mb SDRam
ATI Radeon 9200 128Mb DDR ram @ 4x AGP
(main)SCSI 10000 RPM HDD & (slave)7200 RPM IDE
suicidalsam says:
November 28, 2007 at 2:39 pm (UTC -7 )
can you tell me how big is the installer for this?
I tried to download the file and I just got an exe file of size 21.3 kb ??
Is this the actual size??
Chris says:
November 29, 2007 at 7:04 am (UTC -7 )
The full installer is around 32MB. You might want to try again!
doomerz says:
December 12, 2007 at 12:22 pm (UTC -7 )
Well FoF was working rlly great on my comp (core 2 duo 3.2ghz, 2gb ram, and a geforce 7600 gs silent) but since i bought that geforce 8800gts (and installed the latest drivers) it wont even work!
rgamer says:
December 20, 2007 at 3:47 am (UTC -7 )
I guess I am very lucky I recently got FoF and it works perfect on 2.0 ghz, 512mb ram and surprisingly Vista witch is a resource hog.
somebody says:
December 31, 2007 at 4:56 pm (UTC -7 )
I have a 2.6 GHZ Celeron, 512 mb ram, and a ATI Radion Sapphire x1650 video card. I have no problems running the game at all.
nate says:
January 6, 2008 at 11:32 am (UTC -7 )
ok i have:
2.13 GiG core 2 duo
512 Gforce 8500
2 GiG ram
2 80 Gb hard drives (one ide the other sata)
can someone tell me why it takes so long to start a song but once its starts i have no problems. and once the song ends it also takes forever to show me my scores (by forever i mean like 3 mins) which is rediculus. plz help e-mail me with a solution to my prob. steelgriff15@aim.com
thanx
Chris Kasten says:
January 6, 2008 at 8:59 pm (UTC -7 )
Nate, I think you’d have much more luck at one of the FoF forums…
However, I’ll leave your question here in the event another reader wanders by.
Pete20r2 says:
April 13, 2008 at 6:43 pm (UTC -7 )
Kevin
try putting the audio rate back to default (think its 44100)
lachlan says:
May 16, 2008 at 12:12 am (UTC -7 )
i have:
Nvidia GeForce 6500 (256mb)
Celeron processor (2.1 Ghz)
1 GB RAM
… and my desktop set to 32 bit, but it still lags so bad i cant play. however i know a guy with:
GeForce ??? (32 mb)
Intel ??? Processor (1.5 ghz)
128 mb RAM
… and his desktop is set to 32 bit, but he can play no lag. plz help.
Chris says:
May 16, 2008 at 4:40 pm (UTC -7 )
@lachlan, I’d wager you’ll get more help at a FoF forum.
(that does seem odd though)
collin says:
June 24, 2008 at 9:17 am (UTC -7 )
My computer lags a ton when I play a song, I can’t even play.
2.4 GHz
2Gb ram
32 bit
when I play it uses 100% CPU
FaDeL says:
August 9, 2009 at 11:05 pm (UTC -7 )
Same here.
My spec:
Core2Duo T7500
nVidia GeForce 8400M GS 256 MB
RAM 2 GB
When playing the game, it uses 100% my core0 and doesn’t use my core1.
Because of this, my notebook temperature becomes overheated and shut down unexpectedly.
I’ve tried to set FoF to use both core0 and core1 via task manager, but the game becomes so laggy, and the source used by core0 is higher than core1.
anyone has solution for my problem?
greaper88 says:
December 4, 2008 at 4:56 am (UTC -7 )
I have a problem with the video being slow. The music plays at the correct speed, but the video runs slower. The song starts ahead of the notes, and ends even FURTHER behind before all of the notes ever show on my fret-tracks. Anybody got any ideas?
my system:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.21 GHz on nForce3 chipset
3GB RAM
Video: GeForce 7800 GS OC 256MB at 32-bit
Audio: Sound Blaster x-Fi
2 250 GB SATA HDD in RAID 0
Win XP Pro
doggy says:
October 19, 2009 at 6:58 pm (UTC -7 )
I solved the problem for me, I updated my video card driver and it works at a smooth 60 fps.