StepMania Portable

"StepMania is a free dance and rhythm game featuring 3D graphics, dance pad support, and a step editor."

This is the latest intermediate (BETA) release (20070325). The program itself is under MIT license (used to be under GNU) and is open source. Source is located here. In the zip file are (non-copyrighted) sample songs and courses. All EXEs and DLLs were UPX'd by the developers.

My launcher does the following:

If there is no profile in the Data folder, the default profile is copied to it (this will happen on first launch if you do not put a profile there, instructions below).

If there is a StepMania profile in the My Documents folder (this variable is found through the registry), it will rename that folder to SM temporarily. Else it will skip this step.

It copies the profile in the Data folder to the My Documents folder and then launches StepMania itself.

When StepMania exits, the launcher copies the changed profile back to the Data folder.

If a local profile was backed up, that folder will be again named "StepMania CVS" just as before.

To put your existing profile into this, just copy the "StepMania CVS" folder from your My Documents folder to the Data folder of this application. It is recommended you clear your Cache folder or not include it at all.

To add songs, go to App\StepMania\Songs and add as normal. If you have never done this before, the idea is to have songs in a group folder then the song has its own folder (e.g. Songs\DDR 1st Mix\Butterfly\). For more info, see the official instructions, especially step 3).

To add courses, go to App\StepMania\Courses and do as above, with groups and course files past the group folder (e.g. Courses\DDR 7th Mix\Pop 8.crs).

I would only recommend to stay with the default theme as other themes have not been thoroughly tested with this version.

Basically, you can take your StepMania game anywhere (that has Windows and a decent graphics card) and your scores and settings will all be saved. I don't recommend changing graphics settings as you do not know if every computer you run into is going to run this game at 1280x1024 with 75 Hz refresh rate at a 16:9 AR, etc.

This does not have any kind of splash screen because it causes problems with window focus for this game, which by default goes into full-screen.

Performance on a flash drive is about the same as on a hard disk, but I would not recommend putting a lot of songs as it would cause the program to take longer to load, especially on older computers (non-USB 2.0).

If you've never seen StepMania (or DDR), here is the official site.

Link: StepManiaPortable.zip

Thanks everyone.

EDIT: This does work with older versions (only ones that use a StepMania CVS folder in My Documents for the profile), including builds with the DDR-style arrows included (the new build does not have it and uses a different format), if you are concerned with themes and noteskins. All versions prior to the StepMania CVS My Documents change are already portable, as all of the profile data was stored in Data folder of StepMania's folder.