Guitar Hero II Ephemera | mariteaux

Modding tutorials

I've had this section brewing for a long time, but until recently, I didn't consider it finished enough to link outside of MiloHax. That's changed. Still stuff to write, but I have plenty already that'll get you into the game files and adding new songs and changing strings in the game files. Have a peek.

Rips and mixdowns

I personally mixed these from the in-game stems down, so this is basically the cleanest you'll hear all the neat little bonus tracks and soundalike renditions. The first game's stuff is in here now, and 80's has the demo "I Want Candy" now too. MP3s are encoded by Lame 3.100 at VBR v3, so if you like another bitrate or format, grab the FLACs and transcode them yourself.

• Guitar Hero soundtrack (FLAC, MP3)
• Guitar Hero II soundtrack (FLAC, MP3)
• Guitar Hero II DLC (FLAC, MP3)
• Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's soundtrack (FLAC, MP3)

Be sure to check the soundtracks section on archives for other game rips I've done, some of which are non-GH music games like Rock Band and Rock Revolution.

Discs

I consider myself a charter for GH2, first and foremost. I take songs I can find stems for, either ports from other games or stems I find online, and chart them, trying to give them the game-quality treatment as much as I can. No band members standing around here, we're talking lighting, fretmapping, keyframes, speaker cones—everything popping. Probably my most downloaded work is the enhanced port of "Speed Test" I was tasked to get into Guitar Hero II Deluxe, which is of course, a lot more than just charts.

As far as my own discs go though, they're usually more aimed at showing off my from-scratch charting work or ports from other games like the later Rock Band and Guitar Hero titles. Here's what I've released thusfar. More to come very, very soon:

• Encore: Rocks the 360
  • Releasing: After DX 2.0 launches
  • Setlist
  • All 34 Xbox 360-exclusive GH2 songs, plus two GH1 favorites, brought to GH2 PS2 in full for the first time in a proper campaign.
• Guitar Hero Demo Pack
  • Released: September 12, 2021
  • Trailer
  • The various HMX GH PS2 demos, rounded up onto a single disc using one of the ultra-slick OP2M demo disc loaders from over in Europe. Lightly patched to enable access to otherwise locked-off content.
• marfGH: Volume 0
  • Released: June 14, 2021
  • Setlist
  • Trailer
  • Ten songs of various origins to start off an ongoing series of chart sampler discs.

Charts

And as for my standalone releases! These are rather rare these days, but if someone asks me to chart something and it doesn't fit on a marfGH (at the moment, anyway), I'll release it separately here. You'll have to be decently knowledgeable to get these in-game—the tutorials up there are recommended.

"Graveyard Shift" and "Trippolette" feature a split/re-recorded bass stem and charting fixes. More "vanilla" conversions with the original GH1 authoring are included with both if you prefer that.

"Metal Health" is an upgrade that restores the cut solo to the final chart and fixes some of the final's issues with animations, plus overall undercharting fixes.

Modding tools

I also have a lot of obscure modding tools lying around, and I'd like to see them not disappear when my hard drive eventually does. Here's a ZIP of them. If you need any of this, you should probably join MiloHax too in case you need help or just like dicking around.

As for what's inside:

Apache3

ISO building and disc burning software. Uses CD/DVD2's IMLs to build your disc.

ArkTool

ARK editor, at least for Rock Band 2 and older. Needed to add custom files to an ARK. Comes with its own DTB editor, which you'll need if you have "Perform Crypts" checked when you extract a DTB from an ARK.

ARK Expander

Will take your ARK and balloon it into files and folders on your hard drive for ease of editing. LocalH swears by it. If you add, rename, or delete any files in an expanded ARK, it won't rebuild. Use ArkTool first and then expand.

CD/DVD-ROM Generator 2.00 ("CD/DVD2")

Sony's proprietary disc layout generator. Produces IML files for use in building an ISO.

chart2midi_beta

Turns your FeedBack charts into MIDIs for use in the game. This one will import 90% of the dressing needed for a game-quality chart (such as the notes needed to animate the bassist's speaker cabinet and the practice mode drum machine) if it's present in the chart. I use this constantly and highly recommend it over the older Chart2Mid2Chart.

Chart2Mid2Chart

...Which I still include for posterity. This one can convert MIDI back to FeedBack's charts, but since FeedBack can read in MIDIs anyway (and so can Moonscraper, probably), it's about useless.

dtab

Haskell library for converting between DTA and DTB, GH2's script and tokenized script formats, respectively. Newest version is on onyxite's GitHub, as always.

FeedBack

Chart editor. Good interface, supports tempomapping, global and track events, Star Power and Face-Off sections, can edit lead, rhythm, bass, keys, drummer, and singer. Moonscraper is usable as an alternative (and maybe better for straight charting), but it's bad with events with spaces, which GH2 has many of.

GH2MakerXBox

An all-in-one tool for 360 customs.

GH2 DTB Editor

Standalone DTB editor, same as the one that comes with ArkTool, but works only on encrypted DTBs. I haven't needed it in forever, I just use dtab.

GH2 Image Converter

Converts to and from GH2's loose image format, .bmp_ps2.

GH2 Name Editor

Convenient way to edit song and band names in the setlist, along with preview times, who'll play on stage, and the guitar and venue used in quickplay. This one has the shortnames hardcoded in, unfortunately, so it's useless if you have an expanded or outright custom songs.dtb like I do.

GH360

Another 360 customs injector editor thing. I include both because I don't know which one's any good. I only mod PS2 GH2.

MiloExplorer

Can crack open milo archives for guitar, character, and venue reskins.

ps2str

Generates PSS files, which are the video files GH2 uses. I only include it because of its rarity and because it might work for you where the altogether easier and superior PSS Plex doesn't. But hey, more official Sony kit.

PSSDemux

Demuxer for PSS files. Good for taking apart the videos featured in Rock Band PS2.

PSS Plex

Another PSS muxer and demuxer. I use this to get custom videos in the game, provided you feed it the right files.

Rock Suite

Featured in its entirety, but only RockAudio is any useful. Far better for building VGS files than GHex ever was.

VGS Splitter

A small, slightly quicker alternative to converting VGS to WAV using RockAudio. It's never let me down, even if I rarely have a need for it anymore.

wxPirs

Can browse 360 DLC files. Not strictly GH2-related, but I've needed this to get MOGGs and charts out of GH2 360's DLC.

Xbox Backup Creator

Another general 360 application, but needed to get the ARK out of a GH2 360 disc.