Show HN: Konga Beat – A custom track editor for Donkey Konga 2 and 3 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Konga Beat – A custom track editor for Donkey Konga 2 and 3

kongabeat.com

113 pointsCIARobotFish30 comments

Howdy HN!

For those who don't know, back in the early 2000s, Nintendo and Namco developed a series of music rhythm games for the GameCube featuring Donkey Kong called Donkey Konga: https://www.mariowiki.com/Donkey_Konga_(series)

The Donkey Konga games borrowed heavily from Taiko no Tatsujin (another music rhythm game by Namco). However, instead of taiko drums, the player would use DK Bongos to jam along with music from different eras and genres.

Long story short, I figured out how to add custom tracks to some of the Donkey Konga games (Donkey Konga 2 and 3) but found the entire process cumbersome, so I decided to make a dedicated editor. It was a lot of fun to make, and I hope others get some enjoyment out of it too!

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Nice to see someone doing something to try to get some additional leverage out of the DK bongo drums. They're one of my favorite stupid/unnecessary videogame controller peripherals. They felt like such a missed opportunity, especially in the US. We only got three games that actually supported them, and despite my effort of actually tracking down a second pair of bongos so that my siblings and I could do multiplayer, we discovered that Donkey Konga's multiplayer mode was crap. We then got Donkey Konga 2, which was more of the same but with a worse setlist, and Donkey Konga 3 was never released stateside.

The sole redeeming feature of it was Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, which at least used the controller in a novel way to make an exciting platformer.

Interesting there's no tracklist on wikipedia for DK3 but if it's any consolation, it was very heavily J-Pop and I think maybe 5-8 at most of the tracks were notable or recognizable by a typical westerner, but then again I'm not a massive videogame OST fan so it may have been missed on me. I remember the minigames were pretty cool but all menus were in Japanese and tough to navigate.

Edit, ah there's a tracklist on the mariowiki link. Ah well, this quote on the page: "You can import it from our partners at Lik-Sang." Lik-Sang, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...

It had the Japanese opening to Dragon Ball Z in the tracklist, which was enough to make teenage me disappointed that we didn't get it.

Having decided to look up a run of it on YouTube, however, it's probably just as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkyd_nR4DqE&list=PLNS5TsLf66...

I like to use the bongo drum controller to play super smash bros with my friends! It's a fun and goofy time!

Haha! I did the same thing. If I recall its button mapping is wonky (and maybe missing one?). It does mostly work as a regular controller so it’s possible to play games that aren’t specifically designed for it albeit in a limited fashion.

Donkey Konga is a huge missed opportunity.

Guitar Hero/Rock Band are probably best in show for the genre.

Weird that they were so huge for such a short time. Probably the death of popular instrumented music.

I think it was more that companies way over invested in the concept and saturated the market combined with licensing fees making a lot of the games unprofitable.

Suggestion to put a screenshot or two on the main kongabeat page, there's seemingly no screenshots unless you exit to the itch.io site and was curious about the UI. Nice work!

Good call. I tried fitting a screenshot or two on the homepage before, but couldn't figure out an easy way to do it with the default VitePress layout. I should give it another go.

GameCube hacks are becoming really popular. There's the newly released FlippyDrive which allows booting games from a sd card without soldering or removing the disk drive.

I'm a huge Mario Kart: Double Dash! fan and there's many fan made tracks and fan made roms which includes more tracks and kart.

On that note, Picoboot is also amazing. I've set up Picoboot on multiple GameCubes and even a Triforce (an arcade machine platform which has a DOL-001 mainboard strapped into it.) It does require a bit of soldering, and if you want to power the Pico properly instead of abusing the 3.3V pins, that requires a bit more care. But, it's not very many pins to solder, so as long as you are careful not to burn anything it's actually quite approachable for beginners.

(I never bothered with powering any of them from 5V so far and it has been fine so I'm guessing it's usually OK. I have plenty of backup Picos in case one of them gets blown up.)

Are folks generally using CRTs or is it common to use a newer upscaling approach?

The first american GameCube (DOL-001) has a port that can be used to output in 720i. With that port you can use a device like the popular Carby or any device that uses the GCVideo software. You could make your own.

For upscaling there's Prism HD, a more expensive device

https://insurrectionindustries.com/product/carby-v2/ https://github.com/ikorb/gcvideo https://retro-bit.com/prism-hd/

If you're playing on the Steam Deck, mapping 'touch' on the left and right trackpads to the left and right bongo, and a touch on either joystick (they have capacitive touch) as a clap works rather well.

For those wondering what Donkey Konga is, videogamedunkey has an entertaining video on it and DK Jungle Beat which used the same controller:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKjYYsZzyGA

That's right down my alley. Donkey Kong series has easily the best soundtrack in video game history. Come at me with your 10 million Call of Doodoo super mega epic orchestra, I don't give a flipping banana. Nothing comes close to the large variety of Donkey Kong tracks. Want something relaxing? I've got you covered. Epic? Sure, got that as well. Want something to get you pumping? Nothing easier than that. The best thing? All of that done on a sound chip that's older than those gamer kids that play Battlefield or some other lame first person shooter. Those games are musically bankrupt. Period.

The first DKC soundtrack on SNES was a tour de force for mister Wise.

Nice idea and something I would have otherwise liked to have tried out (I actually have two pairs of DK bongos) but its Windows only and it seems to be closed source. I searched high and low but I couldn't find a link to the source code or even the software licence. :(

Konga Beat uses a paid Unity extension which limits my ability to share the source code in a public repo. The code is also, admittedly, a bit messy. That said, I am happy to share the project's source code if you'd like to check it out! :)

I didn't know I wanted this until I read the Show HN description. Suggest to update the description on the site for people who don't know what Donkey Konga is.

How much different is Donkey Konga compared to Taiko? Wouldn't it have been simpler to adjust already existing tools (i.e osu) to export to whatever proprietary format Donkey Konga uses instead of making an entire new editor and reinventing the wheel?

Admittedly, this may be a disappointing answer: when I started working on Konga Beat, I didn't fully grasp the extent of the rhythm game modding scene. I was so excited to make a dedicated editor that I just went for it.

Only when I was deep into working on Konga Beat did I discover editors like Moonscraper and Peepo Drum Kit. Even then, I was having so much fun working on Konga Beat that I wanted to see it to completion.

I really appreciate how straightforward your replies are

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> Why did you build Konga Beat in C# and Unity and not language X and/or framework Y?

> Knowing what I know now, if I started this project today, I wouldn't use Unity.

Have you thought about what you might use instead?

C# with Avalonia

I quite like working with C#, but Unity introduces a lot of unnecessary overhead and isn't designed to build an application like this. I had to use goofy hacks to make Konga Beat behave approximately like a regular native application.

I still have the bongos, although they may need some repairs to get them properly working again. I'm excited to check this out!

Can't find any source links on the site. Would love to see this made open source!

Would love to hear your feedback either way

nice

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