This Repo contains everything you need to build an ark for Guitar Hero II Deluxe 360, and can also run the included xex on Windows with an included build of Xenia.

Xenia is pre-setup for portable installation, with its own config file that sets a specific option that negates the default latency issues (max_queued_frames = 3).

To run Guitar Hero II Deluxe with an uncapped framerate, set vsync = false in xenia-canary.config.toml.

Unlock all is enabled by default, and the goal of this specific version of gh2 is to strip out as much fluff as possible. The ui philosophy is deliberately taking cues from Clone Hero.

A specific build of x360ce 3.2 that supports guitar mappings is also included if you need it.

• No strum limit executable.

• In game readouts tracking FC, Note Streak, Overstrums, Missed Notes, Song Progress, Stars, Star Progress.

• Drums support including beta drum gems.

• "Overshell" - a custom on screen menu system for changing modifiers/speeds/themes/colors/characters/venues etc. Opened by pressing Select Select on most menu screens. You may just want to get in the habit of spamming select.

• User generated, sharable, ini-like config files to customize the look and feel of the ui, and in game track.

• An increasing selection of modifiers allowing tuning of how you want to play. These modifiers can also be setup as defaults.

• Randomized (or forced) Characters, Venues, and Guitars per song.

• Overhauled menus with additional features.

• Unlimited setlist scrolling. Saving will be disabled after 241 (250 total) songs are loaded.

• Modern Star calculation.

• Feature complete on both Xbox 360 Hardware and Xenia Emulator.

• No overscan by default (requires separate XEX)

• PS2 port in the works (currently unplayable).

• Focus Mode - Blacks out the in-game Venue to focus on gameplay. Upon enabling, the intro/outro animations will be disabled, note streak popups will be disabled, and certain sound effects will be disabled.

• Whammy FX - Disables the pitch shift applied when using the whammy on sustains.

• Track Muting - Disables muting of the currently played instrument when notes are missed.

• No Flames - Removes flame animation on note hits.

• No Fail - Disables failing out of a song.

• Autoplay - Enables the Bot in game. Certain measures have been taken to discourage abuse.

• Tight Speedups - Keeps the default tightening of the engine that occurs when using in-engine speedups.

• Towel Hyperspeed - Mimicks old school Guitar Hero 1 gameplay of the same name, with no towel required. This will lock your track speed to 100%, and notes will be invisible until roughly the middle of the highway.

• Brutal Mode - A poor man's representation of the Rock Band 4 feature of the same name. Notes disappear as they travel down the track. However, the line in which they disappear does not move dynamically, and sustain notes do not disappear.

• Select to restart - Star Power is enabled in practice mode for SP pathing. This modifier will allow you to instead use the select button to reset the current section.

• Name Title - Displays the users given title below the fret smashers in game.

• Song Title Always - Always displays the song info display, this includes the Notes Missed and Overstrums readout.

• Clean MTV - Only displays song title, artist name, and if available, author on the song info display.

• Less Beat Lines - Removes quarter beat lines from the track for a more cleaner amount of beatlines.

• No Division Lines - removes the "strings" verticle lines between frets on the highway.

• Skip Intro - Skips the intro fly in animation when starting a song.

• Skip Outro - Skips the outro win animation when completing a song.

• Force Encore - Forces the current song to act as an encore, gives unique intro camera animation.

• Sound Effects - Disables certain sound effects such as the crowd in game.

• Note Streak Popups - Disables the note streak interval message popups in game.

• Star Power Popup - Disables the "Star Power Ready" message popups in game.

• Highway Shake - Disables the Highway shake on note miss and Star Power deployment. This is required for Clone Hero Hud/skinny highway.

• Monkey Head - The vanilla Monkey Crowd Head cheat.

• Eyeball Head - The vanilla Eyeball Crowd Head cheat.

• Flaming Head - The vanilla Flaming Head cheat.

• Performance Mode - The vanilla performance mode cheat. Combine with autoplay for venue captures.

• Neckless Mode - Removes only the highway in-game, leaving the score meter, crowd meter, and SP bar.

• Roxbury Mode - Hidden away in the vanilla files, this cheat rocks the track on beat in game. Named from the movie "A Night at the Roxbury", referencing the head bob characters in the movie perform.

• Void Frets - Blacks out the inner portion of the fret smasher

• Eyeball Gems - Tucked away in the vanilla files, this applies an eyeball texture to the gems.

• Clone Hero Hud - Changes many aspects of the on screen track. Provides a Clone Hero/WoR Crowd meter, score meter, star power bar, and streak display.

• Bright HOPOs - Applies a new texture to the hopo gems to fully white out the caps. Helps distinguish hopos from strums.

• Dark Strums - Applies a new texture to the strum gems to darken the white portions of the gems. Helps distinguish strums from hopos.

• GH1 Track - Port of the Guitar Hero 1 Gems and Smashers. These will produce a stutter on first load as shaders are being generated for the 3d models.

• GH3 Frets - Custom textured fret smashers ripped from Guitar Hero III.

Opened by pressing Select Select on most menu screens. Overshell is the primary way to customize all aspects of Guitar Hero II Deluxe from within the game. Overshell contains submenus and sometimes even helpful tips as you set new modifications. Some Overshell screens even graphically show you the current selection.

Difficulty - Opens the difficulty menu. This is also where you can set lefty flip.

Color Selector - Opens the color picker menu for various ui elements. Inside is a "Pick Element" button with a list of customizable ui elements. You cannot save these selections from in game for subsequent reboots.

Speed Settings - Opens a slider menu to choose Track Speed, Song Speed, Venue FPS, as well as a shortcut to turning on Focus Mode.

Modifiers - Opens the Modifiers sub-menu. This menu also contains the Select Highway, Select Font, and Track Modifiers sub-menus.

Venue Select - Menu to force a selected venue.

Character Select - Menu to force a selected character.

Guitar Select - Menu to force a selected guitar.

Theme Select - Menu to choose the current UI theme.

Audio Options - The vanilla Audio Options screen for volume adjustments.

The Select Song screen has been re-worked to allow a theoretical infinite amount of songs to be scrolled through.

However, a big drawback is the save file is limited to a total of 250 songs saved before the save will no longer load. To combat this, saving is automatically disabled if the amount of songs loaded exceeds 250 songs.

Guitar Hero II Deluxe technically uses career mode for quickplay gameplay, as such, scores will be shown on the song select screen.

A random song button is also included on the song select screen to shuffle the library.

Additionally, detailed song information in the style of RB/CH is available for DX songs out of the box. As of writing, Onyx support to output this information for dx on new conversions, is currently in development. Some specific artists, namely Harmonix and Neversoft, have custom colors for their author name.

Potential detailed song information includes

• Artist
• Author
• Album
• Year
• Genre
• Origin
• Difficulty
• Length

Previously converted tracks for gh2dx will not have this information unless manually applied.

Album art is also supported via a bmp_xbox (512x512) or bmp_ps2 (256x256) image file in the song folder, in a gen subfolder. The image should be named exactly the same as the shortname of the song. Ex:

• _xenia\content\415607E7\00000002\GHIIDX\songs\arterialblack\arterialblack.bmp_xbox

The build scripts will automatically detect album art in the /Content/ directories for your song, and generate them where they need to go.

These images are read in game from outside of the ARK as raw files. An album_art folder will be generated in _build/Xbox that contains these images for you.

This image generation support is also planned to be coming in a future Onyx update.

The endgame screen has seen some layout changes to make room for some new upgrades.

Average Multiplier, SP Phrases, and Notes Hit are now found on this screen, rather than the section stats screen.

Stars now show a more detailed readout, tracking to the hundredths place.

Notes Hit Percentage now shows a more detailed readout, tracking to the hundredths place.

Various modifier status is reported on screen to give indication on how the player prefers to play.

Theming of a good chunk of UI and Track items is supported in Guitar Hero II Deluxe.

This can be accomplished by modifying _theme/init_track_theme.dta or _theme/init_ui_theme.dta.

Inside both of these scripts are a variety of options to choose from and change colors for your own personalized track theme or ui theme for the game.

Once done editing the dta file to your liking, or installing one found from #gh2-theme-share channel in the Milohax discord, run _theme-dta2b.bat from the root of the repo.

Theme dta files can be shared and transferred between installations just like clone here ini's. Just run _theme-dta2b.bat after aquiring your theme dta.

Re-running Xenia will apply your changes, or, if on hardware, simply copy the two new .dtb files from the _build/Xbox/gen folder to the same location on your Xbox.

The different menu themes in Guitar Hero 2 Deluxe all utilize this theme system for their respective themes, so there is a great variety to choose from!

Custom defaults, such as always setting your preferred track speed, are not saved automatically by Guitar Hero II Deluxe.

Instead, you will have to manually edit a file or two and rebuild the game to save your custom modifiers.

This has been setup to be as easy as possible.

Simply open _ark/ui/init.dta and start editing to your liking. Each modifier has an associated comment paired with it to detail it's functions. Theming options can be found above, reading the Themes section of this readme.

Once done, save the edited dta, and build the ark again. If playing on real hardware, you will have to transfer the entire ark to your Xbox again for the new saved settings.

Editing init.dta will cause conflicts down the road if the file is changed on the repo. if you are having trouble getting new features when building the arks, run _reset.bat to restore the repo to a clean state, and build again.

NOTE: You WILL need a modded/hacked console to play this mod on real hardware. I hope this is clear.

Setting up GHIIDX 360 for the first time is meant to be as easy as possible. As well, it is designed to allow you to automatically receive updates as the repo is updated.

Simply go to the Releases of this repo and grab all three files. (two .exe, one .bat)

The two exe's are a couple dependencies, Git for Windows, and Dot Net 6.0 Runtime. Git is required for you to take advantage of auto updating via github pulls. Dot Net is required to build an ARK file, the archive format the game needs to run. You can setup git with all default options, same with dot net.

Once the dependencies are installed, run _init_repo.bat in an empty folder. git will pull the repo and make sure you are completely up to date.

Once the repo is copied locally to your system, simply run _build_****.bat depending on the build you would like. _build_xbox.bat will build for Xbox Hardware, and output to _build/Xbox/.

_build_ps2.bat is currently in a pre alpha state, it is nowhere near stable, and is being developed along side the 360 version.

Each build script will copy out the opposite platform specific files from the _ark path before building the ark to reduce the final build size.

_build_xenia.bat will build for Xenia, output to _build/Xbox/, and run Xenia from _xenia/.

_run_xenia.bat is also included for subsequent runs of the game in Xenia after the initial build of the ark file.

It is recommended to always run the game with the build scripts to ensure everything is up to date, as currently this project is highly WIP.

After building the Ark, create a new folder in your Xbox 360 games folder (wherever you install your games) for Guitar Hero II Deluxe.

Copy all files inside _build/Xbox to that folder.

Guitar Hero II Deluxe 360 is a self contained game, and does not use any patches or title updates.

If you wish to have video overscan, use default-overscan.xex.

If using Aurora, you can also grab customized box art directly from your internet connected RGH console.

• Scan/Find Guitar Hero II Deluxe in your Aurora games list

• Select Details

• Select Preview

• Scroll left until Download cover is shown

• Select Download cover

• Cover #25456 and Cover #25581 are Guitar Hero II Deluxe Covers

If any issues pop up in the command prompt window when trying to run the build script (typically caused by customized init.dta settings), run the _reset.bat in the root of the repo to restore to a clean state, then run the build script again.

Guitar Hero II Deluxe 360 by default only comes with one song. Exilelord's Speed Test.

For Xenia, you can download song packs using the included scripts at the root of this repo. These scripts will automatically pull from existing repos for ports of songs, and put them where they need to go automatically. Python, as well as gitpython will need to be installed. You can install Python from their website. Make sure to select install as PATH in the installation dialogs. You can install gitpython on via double clicking the install_gitpython.bat script in the dependencies folder after installing Python.

• _download_gh1dx_songs_xenia.bat - GH1DX

• _download_gh2_custom_songs_xenia.bat - Notable/fully authored GH2 customs repo

• _download_gh2dx_songs_xenia.bat - GHIIDX

• _download_gh2dxdlc_songs_xenia.bat - GHIIDXDLC

• _download_gh80sdx_songs_xenia.bat - GH80SDX

You can find Vanilla (LIVE file) song packs for real hardware here.

• GH1DX

• GHIIDX

• GH80SDX

• GHIIDXDLC

You can also use Onyx Music Game Toolkit to generate your own custom song packs for GH2 360.

In the Batch Process window, you can output to GH2 LIVE files from a ton of different source files, such as Clone Hero.

Then, using the Quick Convert window, and Make a pack (360 GH2/RB) tab, you can drag in all GH2 LIVE files you made, and convert to a single pack via the Make LIVE pack button for real hardware, or Make extracted folder button for Xenia.

You can install song packs for Guitar Hero II Deluxe in:

• Xenia: \_xenia\content\415607E7\00000002\XXXXXX
• Hardware: /Hdd1/Content/0000000000000000/415607E7/00000002/XXXXXX

Where XXXXXX is the name of your song pack, containing both a songs and a config folder on Xenia, or a singular LIVE file with no extension on hardware. Con/live files are not supported in Xenia.

There is a max package limit of 16 song packs. The setlist has been completely reworked to allow more songs. After 250 songs loaded, saving will be automatically disabled to prevent crashes. Current max song limit is unknown.

This repo also supports the import of custom highways via the use of an all in one bat file and a couple external dependencies included.

Simply drag in a .jpg/.png/.bmp into the highways folder at the root of the repo, then run _highways.bat This will size your images accordingly (supports arbitrary resolutions), and convert them to the proper format for gh2 to read. ARK files will be generated for a list of your custom highways in game to choose from at will using the overshell (select select on most all menus)

The highway _black_highway is marked as the default in game. If you delete this highway from the custom highways folder, you must select your new highway in game or you will experience a crash.

After running _highways.bat you will need to run _build_****.bat again to build your new ARK.

Git for Windows - CLI application to allow auto updating gh2 repo files

Dot Net 6.0 Runtime - Needed to run ArkHelper

x360ce 3.2 - Specific build to emulate a Xinput device

Mackiloha - ArkHelper for building GH2 ARK - Superfreq for building .bmp_xbox highway images

dtab - For serializing GH2 dtb files

Xenia 930fe2c_canary_experimental - Xbox 360 emulator specific build with a config option that fixes GH2 audio sync

ImageMagick - For converting highways to standard sizes