Looks like the PS3 Fender's dongle is required for wirelessly connecting

[Keebler]

The wireless PS3 Les Paul for GH3 has the exact same set up, in that it uses a USB dongle. IGN confirmed that it is for connecting and that bluetooth likely is out of the picture.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/825/825091p1.html

I would imagine this would apply to the Fender, too.

[TheRocker]

Okay whats going on can they finally explain to us why is a dongle necessary..

http://blog.wired.com/games/images/2007/10/04/dsc03940.jpg

[Bakkster]

Okay whats going on can they finally explain to us why is a dongle necessary..

http://blog.wired.com/games/images/2007/10/04/dsc03940.jpg

It's not BlueTooth (even though I thought it was before). I can understand why not (no guarenteed packet delivery time), hence the dongle.

[AVC808]

that thing is so huge and ugly. seriously wth were they thinking. no guitar pick is that big either designing it that way is pointless. the RB design is much more practical. although no dongle would have been nice.

[Bakkster]

that thing is so huge and ugly. seriously wth were they thinking. no guitar pick is that big either designing it that way is pointless. the RB design is much more practical. although no dongle would have been nice.

Yeah, well a RB or GH guitar doesn't need to be tuned, so why does it have tuning pegs? Because it looks cool, that's why.

[AVC808]

Yeah, well a RB or GH guitar doesn't need to be tuned, so why does it have tuning pegs? Because it looks cool, that's why.
well i understand that a toy guitar wouldn't look like a guitar without tuning pegs. im saying what's the point of making the dongle look like a gigantic guitar pick? looks more like a fan. so you think this looks "cool"?? i suppose some people will think it is, and some will see it the same as me and thinks it looks dumb.
in any case it doesnt afffect me since i have no plans to buy that game, but it just makes we wonder what these people are thinking when they design these things.

[Bakkster]

im saying what's the point of making the dongle look like a gigantic guitar pick?
...
in any case it doesnt afffect me since i have no plans to buy that game, but it just makes we wonder what these people are thinking when they design these things.

Umm, it's got to look like something. Either it can be a box, or it can be something stylistically related to the product. They went with the latter. It hardly affects anything, nor is it worth complaining about.

[toefer]

I'm interested to find out what the deal is with not using Bluetooth. I know the issue with channel hopping was mentioned, and how that could affect a rhythm game, but realistically, it can change between over 1,500 channels per second, so I really don't think that would be an issue. In all my time playing on a PS3, I have never had a problem with any sort of button-delay while playing any sort of game.

I'm not accusing HMX of anything, I just hope at some point they explain why they did things the way they did, because I'm sure they have a reason.

[Bakkster]

I'm interested to find out what the deal is with not using Bluetooth. I know the issue with channel hopping was mentioned, and how that could affect a rhythm game, but realistically, it can change between over 1,500 channels per second, so I really don't think that would be an issue. In all my time playing on a PS3, I have never had a problem with any sort of button-delay while playing any sort of game.

Two theories:
1) BlueTooth has no guarantees on how long it will take a given message to be transmit. This is beyond the channel hopping. BT isn't designed for time-sensitive apps, it instead focuses on being simple and multi-functional. A proprietary system can fix those problems.
2) Sony might not like 3rd party vendors accessing their BT system.Less likely, and pretty stupid on Sony's part (why would it be BT if not to sync with lots of devices?), but still possible.

[i5hawn]

What about the Xbox 360 Les Pauls or even the Strats? Aren't we paying a little extra so we can have just straight wireless controllers?

[logicalnoise]

What about the Xbox 360 Les Pauls or even the Strats? Aren't we paying a little extra so we can have just straight wireless controllers?

different situation. MS owns and is now licensing the propietary signal hopping that 360 uses. BT is a universal standard that looks to be just not as capable as RF in this case without some help via dongle adapters).

[Shoeless]

This is kind of a cynical theory, but do you suppose the reason this was done was simply to create some kind of proprietary wireless system that guarantees incompatibility between the RB Fender and the GHIII game? Thus ensuring that for PS3 owners to play GHIII they HAVE to buy new, additional hardware? They sure can't just use their GH2 guitar the way the Xbox 360 owners can...

I'm not saying that's absolutely what's going on here, but if I were in business, this would make sense to me. Otherwise I'd be terrified of people all buying Rock Band and then only picking the DVD of my game and ignoring the hardware.

[Terranova]

This is kind of a cynical theory, but do you suppose the reason this was done was simply to create some kind of proprietary wireless system that guarantees incompatibility between the RB Fender and the GHIII game? Thus ensuring that for PS3 owners to play GHIII they HAVE to buy new, additional hardware? They sure can't just use their GH2 guitar the way the Xbox 360 owners can...

I'm not saying that's absolutely what's going on here, but if I were in business, this would make sense to me. Otherwise I'd be terrified of people all buying Rock Band and then only picking the DVD of my game and ignoring the hardware.

I could understand that if the dongle method was just for GH3 but Rock band is using the exact same setup, now that could be so the GH3 controllers work with Rock band or it could be as bakkster says in that Blue-tooth isn't good enough for a game like GH3 or rock band that requires no delays with button presses etc, but the problem i see is standard RF signals are prone to interference much more easily, Blue-tooth's advantage was it could change frequency's on he fly less likely to have interference, so using the Dongle you could in theory have more delays so i'm still not totally sure why the dongle method is being used over blue-tooth.

[Terranova]

Just been to Gamespot and they have a preview of the game and the Les Paul.. they asked about the PS3 dongle this is what they were told..

"Guinchard explained to GameSpot that time constraints forced RedOctane to go with the dongle route on the PS3, but he hopes to eventually replace the controller with a dongle-free version after the holiday season. The wireless guitars use two AA batteries and offer an estimated 28 hours of battery life".

If it's going dongle free after the holidays then they must be using blue-tooth for the dongle free version, why they didn't have enough time to implement it in the first place is unknown to me i cant see it being any harder and it means buying another controller just to be dongle free, I wonder if is HMX planning a similar deal with their controllers ?.

28hrs battery life, i would say the rock band Strat would be the same, not to bad but i would rather have a USB wired version.. please HMX say if a wired version is coming to PS3 if so i would gladly get that instead. :(

[TheRocker]

please HMX say if a wired version is coming to PS3 if so i would gladly get that instead. :(

Agreed Terra agreed , i take a Wired over a Dongle

[toefer]

I admit I'm a bit disappointed that the guitars have to have a dongle and use batteries (instead of using a removable USB wire, to charge the controller). But in the end, I'll gladly deal with a dongle if it means having wireless.

I think some people are caught up in wireless suddenly not being as cool, just because it involves plugging in an ugly little dongle. When I'm jumping around off my couch, and sliding around the floor on my back (all while playing guitar, of course), the dongle will be the last thing on my mind.

And since I haven't used the term enough: dongle, dongle, dongle.

[Feigned]

Agreed Terra agreed , i take a Wired over a Dongle

Am I the only one that sees the irony here? The 360 owners wish that their bundle had a wireless guitar, and now the PS3 owners are wanting wired controllers. :p

[tbradshaw]

different situation. MS owns and is now licensing the propietary signal hopping that 360 uses. BT is a universal standard that looks to be just not as capable as RF in this case without some help via dongle adapters).

I don't think it's that Bluetooth isn't as capable. That was my initial thought, but then I was reminded by the roommates that the Wii remotes are Bluetooth devices. I think it's probably just a matter of development time. One thing that is nice about just using an RF transmitter/receiver is the simplicity of the setup. You literally end up with the exact same behavior as a wired guitar--making software support trivial to the point of non-existance.

Bluetooth, however, is interesting in that the specification isn't just a hardware specification on transmission. The Bluetooth standard actually specifies physical layer, network layer, and even application level semantics. Therefore, supporting a Bluetooth device requires a new input channel that uses the Bluetooth stack.

While this is likely identical to supporting the XBox 360 proprietary wireless, it's no secret that Microsoft's development tools are excellent. After paying the licensing fee it, was probably not a significant challenge to implement using the provided libraries. Sony, however, does not have a very good track record with it's developer tools or documentation.

The promise of dongle-less wireless controllers for Rock Band is no doubt related to the pledge of continuing hardware support from Harmonix as the game moves forward. Since they will already have a development effort targeted at supporting additional third party controllers for the game, (Alex described a desire for a "diverse ecosystem" of third party controllers), it won't be a problem to put in the extra man hours towards full Bluetooth support for a later first party controller release.

At least, that's the way that I'm reading it.