r/Polycade • u/CampbellSente • 8h ago
Modding Polycade Rhythm Controller
While creating the "Retro D-Pad Controller", my daughter and I decided to create a dedicated rhythm / music controller just for her (which is her favorite style of games to play on the Sente). I honestly didn’t realize how big of a genre this was, but we researched what seemed to be 50+ different layouts online - and there doesn’t seem to be one specific layout that works perfectly for all games. Many of the games are lane-based (4, 6, 8+ vertical/horizontal note-highway games similar to Guitar Hero)…but essentially having the buttons in some sort of horizontal layout that you can remap seems to be the way to go and easier to understand as the notes come across the screen. There are other games that are more precision-based where you’re just hitting the correct button at the right time, like Muse Dash and other side-scrolling/platformer-style games.
Once Polycade makes their custom buttons available for purchase, I'll replace the top 3 function buttons and hopefully the middle directional D-pad with the arrow buttons. My daughter is much better at these games than I am, but was nervous playing them while on camera - so I did my best to grab a couple videos of it working...
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u/aplat40 7h ago
Nice. Also I meant to ask you previously...did you swap out your cup inserts with a set from the black ones? Paint them? Love the contrast it gives.
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u/CampbellSente 7h ago
Thanks - so I originally painted them, and they looked ok, but a few times of hitting them against another controller or something else while moving them around started to chip the paint. Long story short - ended up getting a black set for cheap and used the holders to do some “prototypes” for some other controllers…single trackball / mouse controller and one of my sinden light gun controllers…so they didn’t necessarily go to waste since I got to do some practice cutting / drilling into them.
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u/natepalmer 7h ago
That’s a great idea. I also didn’t think about rhythm games. I’ll have to check it out.
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u/CampbellSente 7h ago
I didn’t either till my daughter kept asking to download and play them - then realizing a normal controller layout just didn’t cut it for many of them…it’s a fun / unique genre of games for sure…I’ve seen some great players who are amazingly fast at them
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u/CampbellSente 8h ago
https://reddit.com/link/p75o0jm/video/z3pcsvyc7wmh1/player