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Getting a profile

There are two ways in which you can generate a profile for saving your scores:

1. You walk up to the machine, insert your USB device into the machine, play a credit, let the machine save a credit, and go home.
2. You download the default profile which has all the folders set up for you.

Either profile should work immediately and start saving your scores. You will notice that your personal best will now be shown as well as the current machine record.

Device compatability

Any standard USB device which can read and write data should work fine. We would recommend that you use a device of at least 128MB in size (which is less that any memory stick you can buy now!), or 1GB if you intend to include custom songs.

Exceptions to this are:

• Devices which require more than one USB port to function, such as power-hungry hard drives. As you only have one port per player, there goes that plan.
• Devices, such as U3 sticks, which have require two drives mapped. There's no way of reliably forcing these to map to the right place, and I'm not going to put the effort into doing so.
• Encrypted devices. You won't be able to run the software to unlock them, so you'll never get to write data to them. Simples.

Understanding the profile

Your profile has lots of directories and files. This is what each of them do.

root folder

There are three files related to your scores: Stats.xml, which holds the raw data on your play time, and two stylesheets which format this document, Stats.xsl and Common.xsl. You can get a lot of info from Stats.xml, but the more you play the longer it will take to load!

Additionally, there are two more files. Editable.ini allows you to specify three pieces of information about yourself: "Display Name", a nickname which appears on the bottom-left (or bottom-right, if you use player 2) while you play and also appears on your screenshots; "LastUsedHighScoreName", which can be up to five characters long and is your default name for the high score table; and WeightPounds, which is your weight in lbs and used to (completely inaccurately) calculate the amount of calories burnt. LastUsedHighScoreName updates after every credit, so if you change your high score name it will update on your memory card. DisplayName and WeightPounds can only be updated offline. Extra.ini has two options: "AdditionalSpeedMods" is currently disabled but will in future allow you to choose your own speed modifiers for use, which "UseCatalogXML" will allow you save the machine song list to your device. But we recommend you keep that at 0, because there's nothing of interest there and it'll just make your game take longer to play.

LastGood

Don't <em><em><em>EVER</em></em></em> (is that enough emphasis?) touch this folder. If for some reason your profile gets messed up, the game will use LastGood to allow you to revert to a working backup.

Screenshots

If you have a score you're particularly proud of, why not get a picture of it? Press both menu (left and right) buttons and you'll hear a camera shot. This is where your screenies will end up!

Songs

This is where you get to play your own songs on the machine!

Each song must be contained within its own folder, and optionally songs may be grouped within folders, nested <em>one</em> folder deep. Each song folder needs to contain just two files:

• The music file. This must be in <em>OGG</em> format (and not mp3 or wma or aac or flac or wav or flv or swf or any other format you manage to pull from the innertets), and should be encoded at 44.1kHz or 48kHz.
• The step file. This must be the in standard SM step chart format. If you made your file in the editor, that's not something to worry about.

And that's it. It will not read backgrounds and banners, nor will it read movies or movie scripts.

There are generous restrictions on both folder size and stepchart file size (as in if you're breaking it you are most likely being an ejit) and further restrictions on song length:

1. Any sound file which is less that 2:30 in length will take one song to play.
2. Any sound file which is more than 2:30 in length but less than 5:00 in length will take two songs to play, and therefore must be played as first or second song.
3. Any sound file which is more than 5:00 in length but less than 7:30 in length will take three songs to play, and must be chosen as your first and only song.
4. Any sound file which is more than 7:30 in length will not load.

Courses

Apparently you can set your own courses up to play. Good luck getting this working, as I believe it doesn't.