Color me lazy. I'm perfectly willing to settle for a software
solution that lets you hook up PS2 controllers via USB to music, like PSmaX.
Not Jeff Hoefs: he had to use Nintendo PowerGloves, PowerPads (mats),
and Uforce controllers (infrared), which meant digging into a little
DIY serial-to-MIDI conversion and assembly code (see MAKE:Blog for the full story with pics).
So, is this news? Hardly. People have been using PowerGloves for MIDI
for . . . well, almost as long as there have been PowerGloves. (Do a
quick Google search now, before this latest Gizmodo/MAKE hit takes over
. . . I'll select some links for tomorrow for anyone interested; you
can even rip one apart and make new interfaces with it.) Not
that that makes it any less fun, of course, and major kudos to Jeff for
finding a way to use this many Nintendo gadgets at once — that I
haven't seen. Now, as MIDI controllers become deja vu all over again,
can someone come up with something truly new, or are we doomed to
repeat MIDI history forever?