StepMania is an open source project dedicated to simulating a variety of music-related arcade games like Dance Dance Revolution, Pump It Up, EZ2Dancer, and ParaPara Paradise. In these games, a series of arrows scroll up the screen to a point where the player reacts to them by indicating the direction(s) with his/her feet, hands, fingers, what have you.
Any number of songs and their step files can be acquired on the internet for use with the program. The step files sport extensions like:
The
songs themselves come in the usual
formats like
MP3,
OGG, or
WAV.
StepMania can be played with keyboard arrows or a single-purpose dance pad (perhaps utilizing a PS2->USB adapter, as most dance pads are designed for the commercial incarnations of music-related arcade games). www.stepmania.com has the program and more instructions on its use. With recent updates, the joy of StepMania has reached machines running Linux and Mac systems. The especially handy will find out how to fit StepMania on their Xbox consoles through unofficial binaries.
Related info:
www.ddrmaniax.net - step file resource
www.bemanistyle.com - better step file resource
www.stepmania.com/stepmania/downloads.php - StepMania downloads page
www.xbins.org - unofficial Xbox binaries & developer's resource
Much thanks to Saige for reminding me to keep this writeup up to date.