DDR4 RAM is the fastest memory that came on the block just a few years ago. At first, it was prohibitively expensive for anything but the most extreme gaming PCs, but now you can find it in many. Mac DDR Recovery Software - Professional. MAC DDR professional data recovery software recovers deleted data from various kind of data storage media including hard disk drive, memory card, USB drive, PDA devices, music player and other types of removable media available in the market. Windows users are expected to have installed the Microsoft Visual C x86 Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 prior to running the game. For those on a 64-bit operating system, grab the x64 redistributable as well. Windows 7 is the minimum supported version. Mac OS X users need to have Mac OS X 10.6.8 or higher to run StepMania.
Dance With Intensity is the freeware I began DDR with, this is a tutorial which I hope will help you feel comfortable with the soft quickly. Dance with Intensity is not as evolved as Stepmania, but is still pleasant due to an efficient interface and profile handling. If you are several people playing DDR at home, it is very convenient to manage separate profiles with different saved scores. Still Stepmania offers many extra features.
Software set up and install
To set up the software, you need to create a folder 'dance with intensity' and unzip DWI-v250-full.zip inside. Let us begin by lanching DWI without any songs and do the options setup (double clic on DWI2.exe).
Notice that at launch the game displays the number of songs added since last time, then the total number of songs, at the top left corner. Make sure the warning 'not for sale' appears on your screen ; if not, rescale your screen (this will affect only the resolution on which DWI runs, not your usual display).
Go to options and change the following parameters:
In Game Options
Turn game over to end of music (otherwise the game does not let you finish a title if you miss too many arrows) and Users profiles on On.
In Background Options
Danger display on Off (this is annoying when you lose) and AVI quality on 10.
In Gamepad Options
This is where you map your dance mat to the game's controls.
In System Options
Default Sort affects the way songs are sorted in their selection screen : choose 'All music (separated)' and set Time Limit on Off, to have infinite time to choose your song. If you begin, make sure default difficulty is on light.
Musics
Musics for Dance Dance Revolution are grouped in separate folders such as 'Dance Dance Revolution 1st mix'. These folders have to be located in the 'Songs' subfolder of Dance With Intensity. Go get your first titles on the dance school page. Then head to the links. The game looks for new songs at every start, this can take a while. You will save time by launching DWI through the file DWI-skipsearch.bat.
Profiles
With DWI you can manage as profiles as you want. A profile consists of a name, a picture and all the stats of the player. To add a profile, for instance ddrpcgamer, create a subfolder named ddrpcgamer in the folder profiles of Dance With Intensity and put in it a little .png picture. The name of the picture must be 'user.png'.
Sounds and skins
You can change the voice commenting your dance. Just download an 'announcer pack' and put it in the folder Sounds. Activate it in the options, menu announcer/sound selection. You can find new skins for Dance With Intensity as well (folder skins, ' skin selection').
The game
Ddr Game For Computer
At title screen choose Arcade mode, then choose between single, solo and double. double is a one player mode but you play on two mats at once. By hitting the up arrow you discover another mode, solo, which is played with two extra arrows. Few titles are compatible though. Select your profile, and you reach the title selection screen.
On the right of the screen stands the list of folders and songs. In the picture above, Heavy and Hits songs are folders containing respectively 15 and 60 titles. To open or close a folder, just highlight it and press start. You navigate through the songs with left/right arrows. Up/down arrows change difficulty between Light, Standard, Heavy and Complex. All the difficulty levels may not be available depending on the song. Little square icon below the difficulty bar indicates the current difficulty mode : in the picture this is a L for light. Just below, the number of feet indicates the difficulty of the particular song you have selected. The specificities of the song are further developed by the diagram on the bottom left corner:
- Freeze: number of Freeze arrows: you must maintain these for a while
- Chaos: number of arrows in half or quarter times
- Voltage: maximum frequency of arrows
- Air: number of jumps (two arrows simultaneously)
- Stream: total number of arrows
Next to the songs you have already played, your best grade is displayed : E, D , C, B, A, AA, ou AAA (perfect from the beginning to the end). Press start to confirm your choice. Maintain start and you get a special options screen.
With Speed the arrows are crossing the screen quicker, boost makes the arrow accelerate or decelarate while they cross, and appearance let the arrows appear at the last moment. Turn does rotations on every arrows, dark hides the arrows completely and scroll reverse have them scrolling top to down. other option is still mystery to me.
Let us go forward to the game screen!
You have to press the mat when arrows come at the top of the screen, right in front of the still transparent arrows. BUT the display is there to show you WHERE you put your feet, not WHEN. The when is given by the rhythm of the music, this is all DDR is about !
Long yellow arrow are freezes, you have to keep the foot on the mat the whole time. Top of the screen you find the public meter, it reflects your performance. A useful little trick : F12 activates the assist tick, it helps you to find the good tempo. Likewise with F3/F4, you accelerate/brake the game, letting you the time to analyse a tricky arrow combination ! Every arrow you hit is awarded by one out of five performance level, depending on the accuracy of your tempo: miss, boo, good, great! and perfect!! As long as you are above great! you grow your combo counter (24 on the picture).
At the end of the song you get your results with your final grade. If you did not get a E, you pass and get another song. After three songs you have a global score and you are directed back to the title screen.
This ends my tutorial to Dance With Intensity, now go burn the floor !
In this page I am going to explain how to set up Dance Dance Revolution on your computer. You will need a dance mat of course, maybe a Playstation/USB adaptator, a software (actually, a game) and music tracks.
The dance mat
Obviously the choice of the dance mat is very important for your in game enjoyment. This part of the website is the most questions inspiring, that is why I decided to deal with it on a dedicated page:
Rendez-vous on Dance mat reviews. Long story quick, the choice is wide with prices ranging from 15 euros to 600 euros. Beginners will most likely choose reinforced soft dance mats: they have inside them a foam layer which give them thickness, stability and damp. They are worth their 40 euros.
Old mats used to require a Playstation to USB adaptator. I have a section about that at the end of this page.
Softwares/games
The reference for Dance Dance Revolution on a computer is Stepmania.
Stepmania is an adaptation of the game DDR on PC and Mac, free, open source, and full of features. Stepmania is evolving days after days, and has a huge communauty of players. The modding possibilities of Stepmania are impressive: look of the game with alternative themes, original game modes (like the hilarious drunk option), announcer to comment on your dance, video clip and more.
Very strong point, with Stepmania you can play on a local network and even on the internet with a world ranking system, just like Starcraft and the likes!
There was a long period of mess with several competing versions of Stepmania, but the release of Stepmania 5 has well clarified the situation. This time people seems to drop the old 3.9 version and switch to this (excellent) Stepmania 5.
You can have several versions of Stepmania (or Stepmania and Dance with your Intensity) on your computer and make them share the same song library. A good way to save disk space!
Click the image below to go to my tutorial about Stepmania. You will find complete info on this software and set up tips, especially for network play.
The (vintage) alternative to Stepmania is Dance With Intensity.
I love this game because it is the one I started up with. DWI is almost as features full as Stepmania, the user interface is brilliant, the announcer is awesome. What I really miss in Stepmania is the profile handling, far superior in Dance With Intensity. Very useful if several dancers use the same computer and do not want to mix scores.
Unfortunately DWI project stopped long ago, thus it is the same game than in 2003. Since then Stepmania brought its high res graphics and multiplayer, making it the obvious choice.
If you do not care about high res, go on and give Dance With Intensity a shot. Click the picture to access my complete tutorial!
In addition to the freewares DWI and Stepmania, you can find commercial softs, like the In The Groove franchise. I know very little about it ... because I do not want to pay for it! The game is based on Stepmania, but adds several gameplay tricks like the mines, the rolls (similar to the freezes except you tap the arrow all along), the Hands (there are 3 or 4 arrows at a time thus you must use your hands).
Contrary to Stepmania and Dance with Intensity, In The Groove features a mix of songs you do not need to download on the web (after all, you paid for it). This is much like the games Dance Dance Revolution 1,2,3,... you can buy on Playstation or play in arcade. You can not add others songs by yourself.
In The Groove was released on PC, arcade and PS2.
There is a new french player on the market called Yasd. They developped their own Stepmania clone, Feetness. This is sold for Windows, Mac and Linux at 35€ with (only) 15 playable titles. What can sell you on that option is that new titles are regularly offered for download on the website, you even get to choose the new titles through polls. Well, the songs are not offered, you pay for them.
For the sake of completeness I should talk a bit about Flash Flash Revolution which is a flash port of DDR. You play online on a website, and you can only use your keyboard, not mats. Frankly I do not see the point but you've got to satisfy everyone...
Similarly the Stepmania team has begun to test the concept of Stepmania micro which is played through a web browser with the keyboard. It is fun to see how it works, but here at DDR PC Gamer we will stay focus on dance mat playing.
Musics
Last but not least, the songs. A Dance Dance Revolution title is made of the musical file, which can be mp3 or ogg, and a text file describing the succession of arrows. The latest can be either .dwi or .sm, .dwi being accepted by both Stepmania and Dance With Intensity and .sm only by Stepmania.
In addition you can find pictures or even video clip to be displayed in the background during the play. The important thing is, all these elements must be gathered in one folder. More on that in my pages devoted to the softwares, and in the Create your DWIs section.
Stepmania and Dance With Intensity do not come with any song pre-installed; you've got to look for it on the web. To begin with, check my page Dance school out, I give a few titles direct download. Then you should head to the Links and build your collection. New titles are released every day, you can even do yours as I explain it here!!
TV and Hi-Fi outputs
Maybe you own a big TV screen you would like to use for your DDR session, or even an overhead projector with which you could set up huge DDR parties. Good idea! But watch the image/sound/mats synchro!! Most of the time it is a bad idea to use your TV for sound output: the sound signal would go through additional electronic circuits, being delayed in the process. Instead of hitting a Perfect timing, you would end up with mediocre Good.
That's a DDR golden rule: always choose the shortest route between your computer and your ears, so plug the speakers directly to your computer. Even sound cards processing like equalizing can sometimes induce a delay. Personally I own a Hi-fi receiver with HDMI input to process the sound coming from the PC and HDMI output to bring the video to the TV. Everything works nicely in this configuration. Previously I used the optical input (Toslink) which is fine too.
However, the newest versions of Stepmania lets you calibrate your audio sync so now you can make up for a not-so-perfect audio configuration. But the set up is not so easy. See Stepmania, 'calibrate audio sync'.
The adaptator (now deprecated)
Why an adaptator? A couple of years ago, most mats available were designed for the Playstation1/2. Purchasing a Playstation/USB adaptator was a must, but this is not the case anymore.
The dance mats deluxe ignition dance pad features in its 3in1 installment connectors you can directly plug into your PS2, Xbox or PC, then many mats followed this path. If you are equipping today for DDR, you should not worry about adaptators.
BEWARE! Lots of adaptators are on the market, but only one is well suited to dance mats: EMS USB 2, and you can plug two mats with it. According to the official website , other adaptators can work but I personally know only about the EMS.
Why this one? The trick is, directional arrows are dealt with as independent boutons, not as axis. Try to press simultaneously up and down with an axis... does not work.
Where can I get it? On the web, as a (french) example on fl-games. Price is 16€50 plus shipping.
How do I have it work? EMS USB2 needs a driver, download here. Just double click the exe to set it up.
Beware: There is a little swich on the adaptator, it MUST be on 'PC' and not on 'game' or else Windows is lost. Classical trap :D
Once the driver is set up, and the adaptator plugged, check in the setting panel, game controllers that 'axis 4 button 16 joypad' appears twice. If not, check the switch,plug/unplug, or reboot.