Hi

[imRiChY]

Since the arcades doesn't use stepmania, but konami's own software, it's not very easy to say how they are compared to each other. I don't know much about this, but I can state an example.

In The Groove 2 machines is built using stepmania in some way. I do not know if they have J4 the same way as Stepmania has J4, but it's not way off I guess. Getting an excellent on the ITG machine is way easier than getting a perfect on DDR (I am always referring to DDR Extreme when I talk about DDR arcade), but getting a fantastic is harder. What I now would like to compare is a song I have played, both on DDR EX and ITG 2 (if we assume that ITG 2 uses the stepmania JD). Because of the r21 patch on ITG 2, you can bring songs shorter than 2 min on a USB stick and play it on the machine. Therefore, I tried Max 300 on the ITG 2 machine. Here at home, I have a DDR Extreme arcade machine. My personal best is about 25 greats FC. I tried Max 300 at the ITG 2 machine once. I almost didn't warmup, so I just tried the song. It was our first time playing non-ITG songs on the machine, so we just wanted to try 'em out, even though we almost didn't warm up. What did I get? 1 great, 1 miss. I didn't TOTALLY OWN the song like never before, it was just a random decent score. It shows that getting few greats on the ITG machine (and hence stepmania) does not even come close to getting the same score on a DDR machine...

J5 on stepmania is probably a lot closer, but it could also be a bit too much. I don't really know. Just go try it on an arcade machine when you can clear it on your pad

Conclusion: DDR timing is not easily compared to SM timing, but it is more strict for sure.