A skin and configuration settings for playing Beatmania IIDX (“bms”) stuff in “beat” game mode.

This skin is for Stepmania 5.

I created this skin after being frustrated with Lunatic Rave 2. LR2 didn’t work at all in Windows 10, then I couldn’t get better resolution than 640x480; additionally, it isn’t open source. I moved to Stepmania 5 but couldn’t find a working, playable noteskin. This noteskin isn’t pretty, but it does make it possible to play through .bms songs.

This skin is a copy of the zenbuquan skin with some modifications to make it more playable:

• Notes have consistent colors: I found quantization coloring made it very hard to know which key(s) to hit. This skin has white notes, black notes, and record scratch notes all colored consistently and distinctly.
• Record scratch can be moved to the right side: In case you’re playing it on the right
• Receptors are colored just like notes: This again makes it easier to know what key to hit
• Warning time coloring is disabled

Due to these, it means there are fewer “features” which were provided in the zenbuquan version. If you want those, I’d recommend taking the zenbuquan Noteskin and porting over the modifications I’ve done which you want.

1. Clone the repository into your Stepmania NoteSkins folder:

git clone https://github.com/makuto/stepmania-beatmania-skin

The final path should be something like Stepmania/NoteSkins/stepmania-beatmania-skin.

1. Go to Stepmania’s Options and go into the Select Game menu. Find beat and hit enter to select it, then exit
2. Make sure you’ve created a profile so that your configuration gets saved. Go to Profiles in Options and create a new profile
3. Open a Beatmania “.bms” song, then double-tap escape to open options. Set the following options: a. Speed Type: Set this to Constant BPM (C). This ensures songs which change the BPM dynamically will still have your desired speed mod b. Speed Mod: Set this to something like 300 or 400. This is personal preference, but I would recommend starting out at 300-400 and adjusting up/down from there. This setting determines how much space is between each note vertically c. Reverse: Turn this On. This makes notes come down the screen instead of up, which is how Beatmania normally is d. Noteskin: Set this to stepmania-beatmania-skin, which should show up as an option if you installed this repository in your Stepmania NoteSkins folder
4. You may need to finish a song with these settings (you can fail too) so that they get saved to your Profile preferences. I’m not 100% sure what you need to do; all I know is it kept forgetting mine until I think I finished a song or something

Please note that this skin is a work in progress. I intentionally uploaded it as soon as it was playable so that in case I got bored working on tweaks, others could still benefit from it.