Alright, Stepmania fans. Get out your dance mats and your giant-screened monitors. We’re going to have a dance-off with only one mat.

I got this off of ebay just yesterday along with two new DDR mats. The mats have LED lights, which is a new feature to me and made me confident that they were that much better than my old broken mats. I was equally confident about the Super Dual Box Pro, a Playstation-to-USB adapter which allows anyone to use a Playstation or Playstation 2 controller on their PC. It also works with dance mats.

It’s called the Super DUAL Box because it allows for two controllers to be plugged in at one time. There also exists the Sup[er Joy Box 3 and Super Joy Box 5 from the same company, the only difference being the number of supported controller inputs.

With my old mats, I owned the original Super Dual Box, which was not able to automatically map the dance mats to dance mat mode (Start+Select+Up on the controller, held for about three seconds). I was excited to hear that, when set in the driver preferences, the Dual Box Pro could map out dance mat mode automatically. Which meant that, if I decided I wanted to play a bad game of Stepmania against my brother, I wouldn’t have to break out the Playstation controller and manually switch everything to DDR mode. Luckily, the automapping feature is one of the things that worked.

When two mats were plugged in, it all went to heck. Player 1’s mat would end up magically "sharing" Player 2’s mat connection, sending signals for both mats. However, Player 2’s mat was only sending signals for their mat alone, so when they pressed down it conflicted with whatever Player 1’s mat was doing, because Player 1 was counted as, but the Dual Box Pro, both Players 1 and 2.

And I felt totally ripped off. I looked this problem up, and it seems many people have the same problem. The person who sold it to me denies ever hearing of this problem, so I’m going to beat him out with logic and see if he’ll take it back.

Perhaps I’ll switch to something more reliable. Like this. And you should, too.