A five-fret rhythm game for Nintendo Switch homebrew, written in C++17 and SDL2. It plays Clone Hero-style song folders, downloads charts from Chorus Encore in-game, works with Joy-Cons, a Pro Controller or a Wii guitar, and seats up to four players in split screen. It speaks English and Brazilian Portuguese. It is an independent implementation, not a port of Clone Hero's proprietary source.
| Title menu | Song list |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Difficulty select | Results |
 |
 |
| Customize | Practice |
 |
 |
| Multiplayer lobby | Four players |
 |
 |
What changed in this release is in CHANGELOG.md.
Status: the desktop build and all automated tests pass, and the Switch build
cross-compiles with devkitPro into build-switch/switch-hero.nro. Split-screen
multiplayer was played start to finish on a docked console with two and four
players. New in 0.3 and still untested on a console: rumble, the draw batching
and split-screen frame pacing (turn on the timing overlay to check), start-up
from the song-list cache, and practice loops on MP3 songs. Don't treat the
desktop tests as a Switch performance benchmark.
The ready-to-copy build is in release/. Copy release/switch-hero
into the switch folder at the root of the SD card. The zip on the GitHub
release is laid out from the SD card root, so its switch folder goes straight
onto the card:
sd:/switch/switch-hero/
switch-hero.nro
songs/First-Light/ (demo song)
Launch it from the Homebrew Menu. Hold R while starting any game to open the
Homebrew Menu with full memory. That's recommended for big songs and needed if
the download keyboard won't open. Settings are saved to
sd:/switch/switch-hero/settings.cfg and high scores to
sd:/switch/switch-hero/scores.cfg. release/INSTALL.txt
has the same steps for the SD card.
Coming from the prototype when it was called Fretboard? Move your songs and
settings.cfg from sd:/switch/fretboard/ to sd:/switch/switch-hero/, then
delete the old folder so the Homebrew Menu only lists Switch Hero.
- Smooth, steady scrolling. The song clock runs on the real-time timer and slowly leans towards the audio's average position, changing speed by at most 1% (the approach YARG uses). Notes don't wobble with the audio backend's buffer steps. Each note sits exactly where the highway's perspective puts it, and notes fade in from the far end of the board.
- Hit windows and timing grades. How far off a note can be and still count depends on the difficulty: on the Normal setting, +-85 ms on Expert, 92 on Hard, 100 on Medium and 110 on Easy. Options -> Gameplay -> Hit window makes that Strict (about the old fixed 70 ms on Expert) or Lenient. Inside the window, perfect is the closest ~36% of it, great the closest ~64%, and the rest is good, worth 1.35x, 1.15x and 1x. Presses are judged at their input timestamps (SDL events on desktop, the input thread on Switch) rather than at the frame that reads them.
- Timing tips. If a song's hits were consistently early or late (the median of at least 12 hits is 6 ms or more off), the results screen says so and offers Fix timing, which moves the audio offset by that amount.
- Offset calibration. Tap along to set the audio and visual offsets (see Calibration).
- In-game chart downloads from Chorus Encore (see Downloading charts).
- Cut-jewel gems and classic fire. Gems are rendered in 3D ahead of time
and ship in
assets/gems.bin. A ray marcher lights each sprite pixel of a cut jewel in a gunmetal bezel: eight crown facets rise to a flat table, and each facet catches the room and the stage light up the highway differently. The result is saved as textures, so a gem costs one sprite per frame. Gems flatten slightly toward the far end of the board, as the view angle there is shallower. Hammer-ons light the table up white, which stays readable at play size, and star notes are cut stars. Hits throw orange fire, a shockwave, and spark streaks. Perfect hits burn bigger with a star glint, and star power burns blue-white. The strike line pulses with the beat. It's all baked into textures at startup, so it costs little per frame. - High scores. Your best score, stars and full combos are saved for each song, part and difficulty. They show on the song list and difficulty screen, and the results screen calls out a new best.
- Smooth browsing. Charts and covers load on a background thread once the cursor rests, and previews open their audio off the main thread too, so scrolling a big library never hitches. The song list sorts by title, artist or best stars (ZR), and left/right jump between letters, or between star counts when sorted by stars.
- Song previews. Rest on a song and it fades in from its
preview_start_time(or 30% of the way in), then loops. - Rock meter, star power and no-fail mode. A miss drains the meter three times as fast as a hit refills it. Star power pulls it back twice as hard.
- Three controller modes: press-to-hit for Joy-Cons and Pro Controllers, strum, and Wii guitar over Bluetooth.
- Its own look. A 2000s bedroom full of burned CD-Rs, duct tape and grip tape, with every texture generated in code (see Look).
- Split-screen multiplayer, two to four players, docked only, each with their own highway and note colours (see Multiplayer).
- Practice mode. Loop any run of sections with a count-in and see each loop's accuracy (see Practice).
- Solos and section breakdown. Solos get a live counter and a "SOLO 94%" call-out with a bonus, and the results screen breaks a run down by section (see Solos and sections).
- Customization. 13 highways and 24 note colour palettes (see Customization).
- Whammy, rumble and hit ratings. Whammy fills star power on star sustains; controllers buzz on misses and pulse for star power; the PERFECT/GREAT/GOOD pop-up can be turned off.
- English and Portuguese. The first start asks which; Options -> Language changes it.
Two to four players share one console and one song, each on their own board. Pick Multiplayer on the title menu, choose a song, and the lobby opens.
Docked only. Four boards on the handheld screen would be unreadable, and players two to four have no way to hold a Joy-Con that is attached to the console. The menu entry says so before it refuses, and undocking during a song pauses it rather than playing on.
In the lobby every seat is driven by its own controller, all at once:
| Action | Button |
|---|---|
| Join / leave | A / B |
| Pick a row (part, difficulty, highway, note colours) | Up / Down or strum |
| Change it | Left / Right |
| Start | Plus |
Each player picks their own instrument, difficulty, highway and note colours, and gets the hit window their difficulty earns, so an expert and a beginner can share a song. Difficulty stepping skips tiers the chart does not carry. The highway and colours are kept for the next song.
The screen splits side by side for two players and into quadrants for three or four; with three, the fourth quadrant is left empty. Each board keeps its own score, streak, multiplier, star power and rock meter — nothing is shared but the clock and the audio.
Three rules differ from single player, all for the same reason: four people are sharing one screen and one speaker.
- No-fail is forced. Dropping a failed player would leave a dead quarter of the screen for the rest of the song. The rock meter still moves and still reads red; it just stops ejecting anyone.
- The guitar stem is never ducked. There is one shared audio stream, so muting it because one player is in the red would punish the other three.
- No high scores are written.
scores.cfgis keyed by song, part and difficulty with no room for a player, so four runs would fight over one record. The final standings are shown instead: rank, score, accuracy, best streak and full combo, with ties sharing a rank.
If frames drop with four boards on screen, turn off Options -> Audio / video sync -> Film grain first — it is the most expensive effect and the cheapest to lose.
The default Switch layout uses the shoulders and triggers, so chords don't need several face buttons under one thumb.
| Action | Switch | Desktop keyboard |
|---|---|---|
| Green / red / yellow / blue / orange | L / ZL / R / ZR / B | A / S / D / F / G |
| Open note (press-to-hit) | Any fret, or A | Any fret, or Space |
| Strum, if enabled | D-pad up/down | Up/down or Space |
| Star power | X | Left Shift |
| Whammy | Wiggle either stick | Hold W |
| Pause / resume | Plus | P |
| Move through menus | D-pad up/down | Up/down |
| Jump to the next/previous letter in the song list | D-pad left/right | Left/right |
| Change the song list order (title, artist, stars) | ZR | Z |
| Select / confirm | A | Enter |
| Back (menus) | B or Minus | Escape |
| Options from the song list | Y | Tab |
| Download charts from the song list | Plus | O |
| Delete a song from the song list | X | Delete or X |
| Toggle no-fail on the difficulty screen | X | N |
Holding Minus for two seconds returns to the song list from any screen.
B backs out of every menu. It's ignored wherever B is being pressed as a button rather than to leave: during a song and the resume count-in (it's the orange fret), while calibration is taking taps, while rebinding a fret, in the controller test, and in Wii guitar mode (the red fret is back there). Minus always works as back.
The game follows the Guitar Hero flow. The first start asks for a language. The title menu offers Quickplay, Practice, Multiplayer, Download songs, Options and Quit. Quickplay opens the song list. Picking a song asks for an instrument (skipped when the chart only has one part), then a difficulty. All four difficulties are always listed, and the ones the chart doesn't have are greyed out and skipped. The song list shows each part's charted difficulties as E/M/H/X badges. The game remembers the last part and difficulty you played and opens the next song on them.
Pause (Plus) offers resume, restart, change difficulty and quit to the song list. B, Minus or Plus resumes, so backing out of a pause never throws the song away. Resuming counts 3-2-1 over the frozen highway first, and Plus or Minus during the count goes back to the pause menu. The results screen offers continue, retry and change difficulty. It ignores buttons for its first second, so frets still being played as a song ends or fails (B is the orange fret) can't skip past it; the button hints appear once it's listening. The song list opens on the last song you played.
Options has six pages, and each row explains itself at the bottom of the panel:
- Gameplay: controller mode, no fail, hit window, note speed, lefty flip (mirrors the highway so green is on the right), hit ratings (the PERFECT/GREAT/GOOD pop-up) and rumble.
- Audio: music volume (songs and previews) and sound effects volume.
- Audio / video sync: calibrate audio, audio offset, calibrate video, visual offset, a timing overlay that shows average and worst frame times over each second (plus audio clock drift during a song), and film grain.
- Controls: fret buttons, controller test, reset all options (press A twice to confirm).
- Customize: highway and note colours, with a live preview.
- Language: English or Português.
On the results screen, Y switches to a section-by-section view.
Options are saved when you leave the options screen.
On desktop gamepads, directions refer to physical button positions: south = Switch B / Xbox A; east = Switch A / Xbox B; west = Switch Y / Xbox X; north = Switch X / Xbox Y. Analog triggers count as pressed at about half travel.
On the Switch, buttons are sampled on their own thread about once a millisecond, so a press is judged when it arrived rather than rounded to the next frame. That removes up to 16.7 ms of rounding, but not the controller's own report interval.
Practice on the title menu picks a song, part and difficulty like Quickplay, then asks where the loop starts and where it ends: A marks the first section, A again the last (B steps back). The loop plays with a count-in and starts over by itself, showing the loop number and the last loop's accuracy where the rock meter would be. Practice can't fail and records no scores. Pause offers restart loop and change sections. Charts that name no sections are split into eight-measure parts.
Section names come from the chart (.chart [Events], or MIDI EVENTS text,
including Rock Band's prc_ names). Solos come from E solo/soloend or MIDI
note 103 where 116 carries star power. During a solo the rails turn blue and a
counter shows notes hit so far; at its end the game calls out the percentage
("SOLO 94%", or "PERFECT SOLO!") and pays 100 points per note hit, outside the
multiplier.
The default mode needs a fresh press for each note. Notes never play themselves while a button is held.
- Single notes are forgiving: the note's fret has to go down, and a fret still held from the previous note in a fast run doesn't spoil the hit.
- Chords must be fretted exactly. An extra fret makes a wrong chord, not a sloppy right one. Any change that lands on the exact shape counts, so a repeated chord can be re-struck by re-pressing one fret while the others stay down, and a stray finger can be lifted to fix the chord.
- Open notes take any fret, or the dedicated open button.
- Frets held down by an ongoing extended sustain aren't part of the shape and never count against a chord.
- Two notes pressed within the same frame both count.
- A press takes the note it fits that is nearest in time, not the earliest one still inside the window. Otherwise, in a fast run, a dropped note would swallow the next press, and every press after it would land a note behind.
Strum mode, which Wii guitars use, supports HOPO and tap transitions, and lower-fret anchoring for single notes. It has the leniency real guitar games have:
- A strum just before its note still counts.
- A stray strum only costs you once it has had its chance to land.
- Strumming a hammer-on you already played is ignored rather than punished.
Hammer-ons show a white-hot core. Star-power notes are star-shaped, with the same core when they're hammer-ons. Miss any note of a star phrase and the phrase is broken: the rest of its notes turn back into regular gems and it earns no star power. Whammying a held star-phrase sustain (moving the whammy bar, or either stick on a controller) fills star power while it rings, and stretches an active star power. Holding the bar still earns nothing. The song's pitch doesn't bend; only the sustain wobbles, and it glows blue while it's filling the meter. Judgement and scoring are this game's own rules, not a promise of exact Clone Hero score parity.
Options -> Customize picks the highway and the note colors.
- Highways (13): Grip tape, Rosewood, Synthwave, Pastel dream, Hellfire, Diamond plate, Carbon fiber, Thunderstorm, Toxic waste, Zebra, Checkerboard, Nebula and Frostbite. Some have their own effects: lightning, embers, hazard-stripe rails, neon grid lines or a retro sun.
- Note colors (24): from the four-color sets (Classic, Pastel, Neon, Colorblind) to single-color ones like Blood or Gold record, alternating ones like Bumblebee or Candy cane, and gradients like Inferno or Sunset.
A small preview beside the options plays a chart by itself, so each choice can be seen moving before a song. Highways and colors mix freely.
Select WII GUITAR in Options → Gameplay → Controller mode. This uses fixed five-fret
bindings, strum judgement, guitar menu shortcuts, Minus for star power and the
whammy bar.
Bluetooth needs the supplied MissionControl guitar-extension patch from
integrations/missioncontrol/.
Installing the game alone, or using stock MissionControl, isn't enough.
Guitar mode only takes over player one while a controller is connected there. Plus and Minus always respond from the normal controller, so guitar mode can't lock you out of the game. Options → Controls → Controller test shows live input for diagnosing a guitar. Tilt, whammy effects and touch-strip inputs aren't implemented.
Options → Audio / video sync has an audio / input offset and a visual offset. Select Calibrate audio or Calibrate video and press A (green on a Wii guitar) to calibrate by tapping along:
- Audio / input offset: a click track plays through the song channel, so it has the same latency as the music. Tap any fret or strum on every click for 12 taps. Nothing on screen moves with the beat, so only your ears set the timing.
- Visual offset: do the audio offset first. The clicks go silent and notes scroll down the highway. Tap as each note crosses the line.
Each tap is scored against the nearest beat, and the median error becomes the offset. The median means one fumbled tap can't throw it off. The result screen shows the old and new values and warns you when your taps were uneven. A keeps the new value, Y retries, and B or Minus cancels. Left/right on either offset row fine-tunes it in 5 ms steps. A positive audio offset judges notes later.
Switch Hero reads songs from sd:/switch/switch-hero/songs (on desktop,
./songs or --songs FOLDER). At startup a loading screen counts the songs as
it finds them. The scan reads only each song's title and artist; the chart is
parsed when you select the song, and any problems are reported then.
Choose Download songs on the title menu, or press Plus on the song list (O on a keyboard), to browse Chorus Encore, the community Clone Hero chart index. The screen opens on the newest charts. Only charts with a lead guitar part are listed.
- Y searches by song, artist or charter. The Switch opens its system keyboard. On desktop, type the search and press Enter.
- Up/down or strum moves through the results. More results load as you near the end of the list.
- A queues the selected chart for download (or takes it off the queue)
into the songs folder, as
Artist - Name (Charter). Charts download one after another. - X cancels everything: the download running and the queue.
- B (or Minus) goes back. A running queue keeps downloading behind the menus, and its songs join the song list as they finish. If the queue is done, going back opens the song list on the newest download.
Each row shows the guitar intensity rating (six pips, or ? when the chart
has no rating) and in library, downloading or queued #n. The panel
beside the list shows the highlighted chart: cover, album, year, genre,
length and charter, each five-fret part with its intensity and note count per
difficulty, the guitar's peak notes per second, solos, open notes and taps,
and any parts the game can't play.
Charts arrive as .sng packages. The game unpacks them in a staging folder and
moves them into place only when complete, so a failed or cancelled download
never leaves half a song behind. Background videos are skipped, because the
game doesn't play them. The package's metadata becomes song.ini.
The Switch needs an internet connection. Networking only starts the first time
you open the download screen. HTTPS uses the console's own SSL service.
Requests identify the game as switch-hero/0.3.1.
Press X on the song list (the blue fret on a Wii guitar, Delete on a keyboard) to delete the selected song. The game asks first, starting on Keep it, and names the folder it will remove. Deleting removes that song's folder and everything in it from the SD card, along with its high scores. It can't be undone. The game only ever deletes a folder inside the songs folder, never the songs folder itself.
Copy an extracted song folder without editing the chart:
songs/
Artist - Song/
song.ini
notes.chart (or notes.mid)
song.ogg (or song.opus / song.mp3 / guitar.ogg, etc.)
guitar.ogg (optional separate stem)
drums_1.ogg (optional separate stem)
Subfolders are scanned recursively, up to 16 levels deep. Standard file names
are recognized case-insensitively. When both notes.mid and notes.chart
exist, MIDI takes precedence. Other chart file names must be renamed to
notes.chart.
Check a library's parsing and detected stems:
./build/switch-hero --songs /path/to/song-library --inspectThis reports metadata, tracks, note counts, offsets and parsing warnings, and fails if any song fails to parse. It doesn't decode audio; launching a song checks its audio.
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
notes.chart, song.ini |
Implemented; UTF-8 BOM and UTF-16 BOM supported |
notes.mid |
PPQN format 0/1, running status, tempo map, note-on/off |
| Five-fret Guitar/Bass/Rhythm/Co-op/Keys | Implemented, Easy through Expert when charted |
| Tempo changes, offsets | Implemented; song.ini delay takes precedence over .chart Offset |
| Chords, open notes, disjoint/extended sustains | Implemented |
| Natural and forced HOPOs, tap notes | Parsed; used by strum mode |
| MIDI enhanced opens and Phase Shift open/tap SysEx | Implemented, including inclusive tap-end behavior |
| Star-power phrases | Implemented, including MIDI 103/116 selection |
| OGG Vorbis, Opus, MP3 | Desktop tested; Switch decoders built in, awaiting a full hardware run |
| Separate stems | Synchronized streaming mix; numbered drums/vocals replace corresponding combined stems |
| WAV | Desktop tested; Switch supports mono/stereo PCM16 and float32 |
| FLAC | Desktop only; convert to OGG before Switch use |
.sng packages |
Unpacked by the in-game downloader; copied .sng files aren't opened directly |
| ZIP, RAR archives | Not opened; extract to a song folder first |
| Accented titles | Shown without accents (the fonts are ASCII); other scripts show as ? |
| Video/background art, lyrics, solos/BRE special scoring | Not implemented; gameplay still reads regular notes |
| Six-fret guitars, drums, vocals, pro instruments | Not playable in this version |
| Multiplayer, practice speed, saved high scores | Not implemented |
| Exact Clone Hero engine/score parity | Not claimed |
Audio is mixed at 48 kHz stereo on a worker thread, with a bounded queue and small per-stem decode buffers. Mono and stereo stems at 8–192 kHz are resampled, and streams are never loaded in full. The desktop decoder is libsndfile. The Switch uses libvorbisfile, libopusfile, mpg123 and a small WAV reader. Minor damage in a stem, such as an Ogg page with bad timestamps, is skipped rather than stopping the song.
The game ships no sound-effect files: every interface sound is synthesised in
code when the mixer starts (buildSfx in src/audio.cpp):
- a pick scrape for moving through the list
- a distorted power chord for confirming
- drumstick clicks counting the song in
- a dead-string screech when a note is dropped
- a riser into star power
- a shimmer for streak milestones
- chords for finishing or failing a set
One mixer runs for the whole session. The song plays on its own pausable channel, and effects play on a second channel that is always live, so menus and the pause screen still make noise. If a second output can't be opened, the song still plays, just without effects.
A song is scored against a rock meter that works like a tug of war. Every note hit pulls the needle one step toward green, while a missed note or a strum at nothing drags it three steps toward red. Star power pulls twice as hard per note. Deep in the red the meter flashes, the screen pulses red, and the guitar stem drops out of the mix while the rest of the band keeps playing. The stem comes back when you recover. If the meter empties, the song ends in failure. Songs with a single mixed audio file keep playing normally in the red, since there's no separate guitar to mute.
Turn the meter off with No fail in Options → Gameplay, or with X (N on a keyboard, blue fret on a Wii guitar) on the difficulty screen, which shows whether it's on.
Switch Hero has its own art direction: a 2000s older-brother bedroom, all burned
CD-Rs and Sharpie, duct tape, skate grip tape, spray-paint stencil lettering,
chrome and a CRT glow. Every texture is generated in code at startup: grip
tape, tape strips, brushed metal, the wall, gems, fret buttons and fire. The
only art files are three fonts in assets/fonts. They're embedded in the
Switch NRO's RomFS, and loaded from the working directory on desktop. A song's
own album.jpg/album.png (or cover.*) is shown beside the disc in the song
list, decoded with the vendored public-domain stb_image.h.
| Font | Use | License |
|---|---|---|
| Black Ops One | stencil headings, score | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Permanent Marker | Sharpie handwriting | Apache License 2.0 |
| Russo One | body text | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
The frame is finished with a single grade pass (vignette, CRT scanlines and a
tiling film grain), drawn by look::grade() after everything else, once,
just before the frame is presented. That way the highway, gems and HUD share one
light instead of each carrying its own, and the image reads as one photograph
rather than pasted-together parts. Anything added to a screen has to draw before
the grade to sit under it.
Gems cast a contact shadow on the board, a held fret spills its colour back up the lane, and the far end of the highway is hazed over, with notes fading in as they leave it. The gameplay read-outs are bolted to a brushed-metal faceplate with engraved rules, and a long score shrinks to fit it.
The board is only lightly foreshortened, and the default lookahead is 1.2 seconds. A harder taper or a longer lookahead crushes most of the chart into the top of the highway. If fast runs are hard to read, raise Note speed in Options → Gameplay.
tools/make_fonts.py re-bakes the .font atlases from the TTFs (needs Pillow).
icon.jpg (256x256) is the NRO icon shown in the Homebrew Menu, supplied by the
project owner.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake libsdl2-dev libsndfile1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev python3 ffmpeg
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --parallel 4
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure
./build/switch-hero --songs ./songsUse libsndfile 1.1 or newer for MP3 support. The included First Light song is
an original generated exercise, with a tempo change from 120 to 150 BPM. To
regenerate it:
python3 tools/make_demo.py songs/First-Light--timing shows frame time, how far the song clock sits from the audio
(drift), and the clock's running speed (rate) while playing. Healthy playback
keeps drift within a few ms and rate within 1 ± 0.01.
Install the official devkitPro toolchain following
https://devkitpro.org/wiki/Getting_Started. With dkp-pacman configured:
sudo dkp-pacman -S --needed switch-dev switch-sdl2 switch-libvorbis switch-opusfile switch-mpg123 switch-curl
bash tools/build-switch.shIf your devkitPro setup uses pacman directly, use that in place of
dkp-pacman. The build script expects CMake on PATH and defaults DEVKITPRO to
/opt/devkitpro. The switch-dev group supplies switch-cmake. Without a local
toolchain, build in Docker:
docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/work" -w /work devkitpro/devkita64:latest \
bash -lc 'bash tools/build-switch.sh'The output is build-switch/switch-hero.nro. Copy it over
release/switch-hero/switch-hero.nro to refresh the release.
First hardware check:
- Boot the game and play the demo song with both triggers.
- Pause, resume and finish the song.
- Play a downloaded song with several audio stems.
- Calibrate both offsets.
- Play a dense chart with steady scrolling.
ctest runs:
- core: tempo changes, chart/MIDI equivalence, offset precedence, note
modifiers, SysEx boundaries, malformed input, stem selection, hit rules,
extended sustains, star power and the rock meter. Its fixtures are generated
by
tests/make_fixtures.py, which needs ffmpeg built with libvorbis. - audio: WAV, OGG, Opus, MP3 and FLAC decoding, plus playback, pause and restart.
- timing: the song clock against a stepped audio clock (speed, settling, jumps, never running backwards), press timestamps, and tap calibration.
- enchor: search requests and responses, folder names, and
.sngunpacking, including path traversal, truncated and bogus packages. - guitar: Wii guitar input routing.
A real SDL virtual-controller test plays the demo through the normal input path:
SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dummy SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dummy \
./build/switch-hero --songs ./songs --smoke --screenshot preview.bmpIt fails if fewer than two notes are hit or playback is interrupted. It uses default bindings and doesn't save its settings. The dummy audio driver proves the software works together, not physical sound or output latency.
src/song.cpp: chart/MIDI parsing, metadata, tempo conversions, stem discovery.include/game.hpp: timing judgement, sustains, combo, star power and rock meter.include/clock.hpp: the song clock.include/calibration.hpp: tap-along offset calibration.src/audio.cpp: streaming decoders, mixing, sound effects and the calibration click track.src/enchor.cpp: Chorus Encore requests and responses, and.sngunpacking.src/downloader.cpp: the background download thread (curl; libnx sockets on Switch).src/main.cpp: screens, highway layout, menus, controller mapping, Switch libnx input.src/look.cpp: fonts, procedural textures, gems, fret buttons, fire, UI pieces.include/guitar_input.hpp,integrations/missioncontrol/: Wii guitar support.tools/make_fonts.py: bakesassets/fonts/*.fontatlases from the bundled TTFs.switch-hero --bake-gems assets/gems.bin(desktop build): re-renders the jewel gem sprites the game loads at start-up. Rerun it after changing the gem renderer; thegemstest checks the file still matches.tools/build-switch.sh: devkitPro CMake/NRO build.tests/: fixtures and parser, gameplay, audio, timing and download tests.release/: the ready-to-copy Switch build and install instructions.
The implementation follows publicly documented formats. No Clone Hero or Guitar Hero game code, graphics or music is included.
- Chart formats: https://github.com/TheNathannator/GuitarGame_ChartFormats
.sngformat: https://github.com/mdsitton/SngFileFormat- Chorus Encore: https://www.enchor.us/. The download endpoints match its official client, Bridge. No Bridge code is used.
- Timing model inspired by YARG
- SDL: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL
- libnx: https://github.com/switchbrew/libnx
- devkitPro portlibs/build definitions: https://github.com/devkitPro/pacman-packages
- libsndfile: https://github.com/libsndfile/libsndfile
- curl: https://curl.se/ (curl license)
- nlohmann/json 3.11.3, vendored as
vendor/json.hpp: MIT - stb_image, vendored as
vendor/stb_image.h: public domain / MIT
Project source: MIT. Dependencies keep their own licenses. Fonts are covered
by the licenses in assets/fonts.