[PPD] Playing Project DIVA simulator: Project -Project DXXX-

Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA was a rhythm game produced by SEGA for Sony’s PSP. This involves pressing the correct combination of buttons as they appear onscreen, whilst Miku dances around in the background singing. Now there’s a fanmade version of Project DIVA that simulates the gameplay which you would experience on the PSP or the Arcade version. Project -Project DXXX- is a simulator that runs on the computer, created by KHCmaster. Now I don’t own a PSP and haven’t had the chance to actually play Project DIVA, but from what I understand, DIVA has a whole lot of extras such as changing Miku’s costume. This only simulates the gameplay and focuses on the PV or video of the song you’re playing.

Main Menu of Songs (running on Windows Vista Business)

I discovered this about a fortnight ago when I was looking at some Project DIVA footage and starting searching for a way for me to play it or something as similar as possible. From what I could tell, PPD’s gameplay is just like the real thing. Asides from the background video footage being different (PPD plays the video that you’ve designated in the songs folder), it looks very similar. If you wanted to, you could just take footage from Project DIVA and use it here as well.

The gameplay is simple like most rhythm games, hit the notes as the coloured icons reach the grayed out ones and you’re judged on how accurate you were. I actually found some of the songs quite hard to start with, not having played many rhythm games before (only Guitar Hero and Taiko no Tatsujin).

Installing the game can be straightforward or an absolute nightmare trying to work out what went wrong. The game can be downloaded here (latest version is 1.3.2 at time of writing). However, in order to make this work, a few other things need to be installed and the right codecs are a must. KHCmaster has written a short tutorial on how to install and play PPD, which can be found here: http://khchp.web.fc2.com/ppd/1eng.htm. Or alternatively, I’ve included the links to the appropriate downloads below.

• Microsoft.NET Framework
• DirectX Runtime
• SlimDX Runtime (March 2009 SP1) or newer
• DirectShow.NET (DirectShowLibV2-0 is the folder needed)

DirectShowLib-2005.dll from the last file is needed to be unzipped and placed into the PPD folder. Video codecs are also needed for this to work. I’d recommend the either the Combined Community Codec Pack or K-Lite Codec Pack. I ran into quite a problem here, as I normally run CCCP but still found it wouldn’t work. It turns out that PPD couldn’t detect the codecs as they were 32-bit ones and I was running 64-bit Vista. Easy solution was to instal K-Lite’s 64-bit pack found on that same page.

The main folder should look like this (but minus the PPDeditor folder).

After all that, you will need the song files to make the game work. The song files can be downloaded from here, all are in zip compressed folders and you can tell the name of the song under the column “ORIGINAL”. For example, 3.zip is Black★Rock Shooter and you would download by following the page by first clicking on “3.zip” and clicking on download. Once you have the contents of that copied into PPD’s song folder, the last thing you will need is the video to make it run (this could be downloaded from Youtube). This can be any format, so long as you have the codecs to allow it to play. Once you have the video, rename it to movie.format (e.g. movie.mp4) and place it in the folder of the appropriate song.

The music folder should end up looking something like this. (This is my BRS one)

Then, run KeyConfiger.exe in PPD’s main folder and set up the buttons in the following order (first for keyboard and then for joystick): Square, Cross, Circle, Triangle, Left, Down, Right, Up, L, R, Start. If you don’t use a joystick, then just keep pressing next (次へ). This also happens to act as a test for the game to see if you have all the requirements necessary for the game to run. After that, the game should work properly. There is also a PPDeditor, which is used to make the songs for PPD, but I’ve yet to experiment with that so don’t have a clue as to how to work it yet. Good Luck.

KHCmaster’s blog: http://projectdxxx.blog9.fc2.com/ and Twitter: http://twitter.com/KHCmaster