Worklog Guitar Hiiro

[Legend]

Im back again with a project I plan to actually finish. So after showing a non-modding buddy of mine Ginger's video of a wii inside of a wii fit board, I had a thought come to mind. My username (Legend) derives from Legendofrock69 (my original xbox gamer tag from when I was a kid) because I loved guitar hero and was pretty good at it. I had a quick meme thought as I've been getting back into guitar hero lately and joked about putting a wii and a screen into a guitar hero guitar for the laughs but very quickly realized how impractical it would be to bend over and look at the guitar while playing, but it stemmed a train of thoughts and old memories I forgot about.

Back when I was young and guitar hero was still a big thing, I was at a friend's birthday party and when it came time for him to open his presents, he pulled out something really cool. That really cool present was Guitar Super Star. Guitar Super Star was a super not good plug n play clone of guitar hero and I think the novelty of it was far more cool than the actual device and gameplay itself.

All of this brought me to think: what if there was a true plug and play guitar hero? With much thought and rough planning, I would like to present you folks something that I haven't seen done yet: a TRUE plug and play guitar hero.

This build will feature the following:

- Guitar Hero 5 Wii Controller
- 4 Layer Wii with a modified lmao trim to keep the footprint smaller but still retain 3 mounting points
- Same fan and heatsink combo as the ashiida
- BT relocation
- RVL-PMS 2
- PMS-PD 3
- ElectronAVE
- (x4) 5000mah 21700 Cells (if they'll fit)
- Custom PCB to adapt the ElectronAVE HDMI port to a micro HDMI port. This pcb will also house a 4 Pole 3.5mm jack to use an adapter for RCA AV plug ins as well as a Toggle switch for the mode pin to be able to Toggle between either outputs.
- A custom pcb for the addressable LED and another Toggle switch for power as I prefer that over the tact switch included with the PMS PD
- 3D printed frame for each respective pcb that I will hopefully find a way to mount properly lol
- Wiimote in its original place but battery terminals will be wired to to prevent having to change batteries etc.

Once this idea presented itself in my brain, I started by looking at all the guitars made for the wii and was looking to see what the most practical option would be. My options were the OG Les Paul, the GH World Tour Guitar, the GH5 Guitar, and the Warriors of rock guitar. I ended up kind of narrowing it down to the GH5 or Les Paul as the warriors of rock guitar is not plausible (if you've ever seen it you'll know what I mean), and the World Tour guitar is identical to the GH5 guitar, but I've read the GH5 guitar is more reliable as it was made later.

I looked at pictures of the internals of both guitars and found out that the Les Paul is possible to do, but the vent for the wii would have to point downward as your holding the guitar and the spacial constraints don't really allow me to put the wii anywhere else so as much as I would like to use the Les Paul, the GH5 is the better option due to space and reliability. There seems to be a perfect spot toward the bottom of the body to put the wii and frame.

The idea with my frame is to make something of an "L" shape for everything so I can glue it down to the inside of the shell and cut out a portion of the side of the guitar for the "L" portion of the frame to sit so I can have my ports and buttons. It also just so happens that that portion of the guitar is the flatest side so I won't have too much trouble trying to blend my main frame in the natural curves of the guitar.

The main frame will house the wii, PMS, PD board, the power Toggle switch, and possibly the IR sensor for the ElectronAVE to be able to configure it. My idea for the Ventilation intake is extruding a cylinder and making a vent that requires me to cut a hole through the front of the guitar and faceplate just under the Starpower button near the strum bar. This seems like the best and cleanest place to put the intake, and the exhaust will go out of the side of the guitar near some of the ports. I'll make a second frame not far from the first to house the micro hdmi port, 3.5mm jack, and video Toggle switch. As for the batteries, I'll most likely make brackets for them to lock into so they're not loose in the case and they will have to go into any crevice they will comfortably fit, and I can wire them all together that way. I've also considered hard wiring the removable neck and placing the batteries in the neck, but I'm not sure if they'd even fit or how weird that might be with the weight so I'll see if I can place them in the body first as I want to keep the removable neck if possible.

The idea is to get something like a 10ft braded micro hdmi to hdmi cable OR the RCA AV adapter and long AV cables and have just either cord alone plug into a TV and be able to switch the console on and play guitar hero. It can still of course be charged via USBC but I'm aiming for a 1 cord setup. I have a 4 layer wii on hand and am going to install RVLoader, all guitar hero games, and wait for the GH5 guitar I ordered to test the software side of things and make sure it plays nice with RVLoader. if it does, I'll order everything else for testing and measure stuff so I can start designing my frames and pcb's. I do have very rough mock-up pictures but I'll wait until I have something more solid before posting my ideas just to keep this worklog as clean as I can.

This will be a project that will take me a while to complete as I need to order a lot of things but given everything works out, it'll be pretty sick! I'll update once I've tested things and better show you guys what my whole idea looks like! Thanks for reading

 

[Legend]

Little update: it turns out I got a World Tour guitar but its very identical to the GH5 guitar so ill work with that for now. I should get it either today or tomorrow so I can peel it open to see exactly what im working with and start actually putting some ideas on paper to show you folks.

A few things that concern me are a few messages i found when searching the discord for information. I was reading that guitar hero tries to gather data from the sd card or something so I'll test that when I get the guitar and if that's the case, I don't mind relocating the port of its absolutely necessary.

My main concern however is a user who was testing guitar heros with RVLoader and couldn't get them to consistently work. They theorized that it may be an issue with missing cIOS's. These messages were 2 years or more ago so RVLoader has of course changed a lot since then so I'm gonna do some thorough testing when I get my guitar and try different things if they don't work, but fingers crossed!

I'll update when I have everything!

 

[Legend]

Got the guitar and before doing anything, I peeled it apart to see exactly what kind of constraints I'm working with.

Here is a picture of the inside:

So I plan to have the wii mounted around the bottom but I'm going to need to have the same kind of setup as the ashida in terms of "stacking" the wii over the PMS to save space. I plan on removing the "phone jack" as it's useless (fun fact is they were originally going to use that port for a pedal add on but it never came to fruition) and using that space for something, whether it be the PD board or one of the custom PCB's for the ports and switches. I still need to reference a few things to get dimensions to test out some configurations. I also concluded that 2 batteries beside each other will definitely fit in the top right corner of the guitar, and 2 more should fit in the top left corner however they will have to be positioned oddly, but whatever works right lol

I measured my most narrow point in the case and realized I may need to do a sort of omega trim as I only have 64.5mm max to work with but I'll confirm what I'm going to do after referencing the compendium etc.

The next step for me is to install RVLoader on the wii I have and test things on the software side. I'm really hoping I don't run into issues however I've read more into what cIOS is recommended for certain GH games so I'll cross that bridge if/ when I get there. Given everything works, I'm going to relocate the nand as I have an old BB relocation Flex from a few years ago laying around, then I'll start measuring things more deeply and whip up some prototype frames for the guitar as well as start designing my custom PCB's.

I'll update soon!

 

[Legend]

Software update!

So I managed to get all Guitar Hero games installed onto the wii!

I haven't tested all of them extensively however I'm happy to report that they do work! And I was lucky enough to have them all just barely fit onto a 32GB SD card.

I made sure to test GH Metallica and GH Warriors of Rock first as those games were the ones I've seen people have issues with due to mic support etc. But RVLoader is king and just loads them right out of the gate! The only issue I had was GH Metallica would not save when the "USB Saves" option was ticked in rvloader so I unchecked it and it saves fine now to the console.

My next steps are installing my nand flex peeling the guitar back open so I can start measuring things and coming up with some prototypes etc. It may be a while until I have another update as life is super busy but I'll do what I can to get something soon!

 

[Mrak408]

I've wondered if this exact concept was possible ever since I first heard of Wii trimming. I am very pleasantly surprised that someone is actually doing it, an absolute chad.

although, it cant be a successful build unless you beat holy wars on it. /s

 

[Legend]

I've wondered if this exact concept was possible ever since I first heard of Wii trimming. I am very pleasantly surprised that someone is actually doing it, an absolute chad.

although, it cant be a successful build unless you beat holy wars on it. /s

You better believe that holy wars will be beaten on expert hyperspeed 5! Sudden Death will also soon follow haha

 

[Legend]

Little brainstorm update (sorry in advance for all the updates with very few pictures lol)

I've been doing some measuring and whatnot and I think everything will work out okay in this build. At first I was concerned about one of the screw posts for the whammy bar (see below)

For some reason my brain was telling me that the wii needed to be directly flat with the faceplate and I was worried I was going to have to trim in a weird way to get it to fit. In these thoughts, I wasn't accounting for the fan and heatsink that need to go under the wii lol. This screw post is 19mm high and the fan and heatsink combo will be at least 20mm (not including the frame it sits on) so that gives me room to set the wii over that screw post thus giving me a lot more space to work with. I'll still have to relocate the nand to get it to fit but I won't have to do any weird trims. I plan to cut the old ribbon style cable that is wired to the whammy potentiometer and wire it differently so it's out of the way to give me as much space as possible.

As for steps going forward: I've started the process of relocating the nand but it's been hard to find time to get it done but I'll probably do it sometime this week. I'm trying to do everything I can without trimming the wii so I can test things etc.

After poking around at some things, I've decided to make some design changes. Instead of going with the ElectronAVE I've decided to go with Yveltals FujiFlex and there's a few reasons for this: I'm canadian and the ElectronAVE is $110 usd which equates to around $150 cad and this is without shipping and taxes etc. I can assemble the FujiFlex for a lot cheaper and Yveltal has been gracious enough to provide output adapters as well so I don't have to do so much work trying to get my custom output pcb designed.

He has a type A and type C output adapters in the github repo and after a brief chat about hdmi ports, I've decided to go with a mini hdmi port as opposed to micro for the simple fact that he already has a design for it, and the mini will be easier to work with as it has 1 row of pins as opposed to the micro which has 2 rows of pins. Going with the fujiflex also allows me to go through the programming process and document it from a semi-noobs perspective for anybody who may want to do it themselves. I might order and assemble Extras for anybody who may want one as well but we'll see about that. With all of this being said, it's possible that I may add a GC controller port to configure GCVideo and how funny would it be to play some gamecube games from a guitar console

Depending on how long this project takes and if mjolnir is released before its done, I may go with thundervolt as a power option but if I do stick with the RVL-PMS, I found that loopj made something of a modular power board that I would consider using as I don't want spaghetti in this build lol

That's it for brainstorming for now. My next steps are relocating my nand and starting to order things to get Fujiflex on the go. I'll also have to design one of my custom pcbs to make sure fujiflex works so I'll be getting on that when I can. I promise my next updates will be more picture oriented as I know somebody out there may want to see what's going on lol

Big thanks to @Yveltal and @loopj for pioneering some great things as well as making them open source to use! And big thanks to everyone at 4layer for all of the custom options. I'll be back soon with updates!

 

[Legend]

Update time!

So its been a slow go trying to work on this due to work and life in general but it is still being worked on!

Ive started designing the frame in fusion to use the RVL-PMS as well as the PMS-PD but the design is subject to change in the event that Mjolnir: the thundervolt companion board is released before im done designing everything.

Right now I have the fan and dual heatsink setup as well as the wii mounting holes along with where i plan to place the PD board and USBC port. this setup uses a 5v 30mm fan and heatsink for the GPU and a 25mm heatsink for the CPU. Ive found that in order to fit everything as well as still have a custom PCB wrap around the fan and heatsinks, Im going to need to suspend my wii mounting screw posts and mount them to the actual fan/ heatsink support. Ive also figured out that by the way I have the PMS-PD tucked under the 25mm heatsink, im going to need to split my custom PCB into 2 boards as I cant fit one whole board over the screw posts and have it tuck under the heatsink, so I think im going to have to use an FFC cable as well as something a little more bulky like a molex connector for the CHRG and GND etc. but ill see how everything works as I go.

Also as much as I wanted to keep this whole frame on the top face of the guitar to prevent having to cut a whole bunch of the guitar up and potentially make mistakes, ive realized that im going to need to cut a small portion of the bottom plate of the guitar to make room for my fan vent, but it is what it is.

Thats it for now until I get time to work on this a little more!