Plaidophile

Was easy, and free, since I was able to use nothing but stuff Delphine had laying around which she was willing to part with. :D

I ended up doing something which is (IMO) far superior to what ddrfreak recommends. This is how I built the second one; the first one took a bit longer because I had to figure out the process (the second one went really quickly).

1. Prepared (i.e. cleaned off) a 38"x40" plank of particle board
2. Laid a dance mat on it in the middle and marked 10 holes for drilling about 1" from the edge (one on each corner, two on the top and bottom edges, and one on each side)
3. Removed the mat, drilled the holes with 1/4" diameter, and cleaned the board again
4. Laid the mat down, and taped down the left and right edges securely with clear packing tape
5. Laid clean window insulation plastic on top
6. Used a hair dryer to warm up the window insulation to make it stretchy and soft
7. Affixed the corners of the insulation plastic with a bolt, washer, and nut, keeping it taut
8. Affixed the other screwholes, again keeping the plastic taut
9. Cut a notch in the window insulation plastic for the cord
10. Folded the excess insulation plastic around the edges of the particle board, and used packing tape to affix it (making the corners nice and safe)

The nice thing about this method is that if a pad should still happen to wear out, I can easily just remove the edge tape and 6 of the bolts and then swap out the pad with a new one. But I don't think it'll wear out; the pad doesn't slip around at all inside, and the platform itself is heavy enough that it doesn't slide around at all when I play. I could even pass a set in double mode! (I only got a D rating, but I still passed. Not bad for my very first time doing double!)

So yeah, there's the two platforms, and also my couch in the background (with the bag from Best Buy in which I brought home the extension cord for the 2P pad), my coffee table off to the side, and my cheezy overhead projector setup in the foreground. Yay!

I took some other pictures but they didn't come out too well. I need a decent digital camera.

Next step is to add some sort of registration bumps. Delphine suggested using packing tape to hold down the zip cord. But it would seem that I don't currently have any zip cord which isn't in use, or at least if I do I can't find it. The main thing is I just want to tell when my feet are getting off-center, which is very easy to do especially in long series of complex steps where you don't have a chance to look at your feet while playing. Unless that's supposed to be part of the skill (being able to track the steps while watching your feet)...

Of course, if you're really heavily into this stuff, you can always build your own arcade-style pads, which looks like it'd take several days' worth of planning and construction, not to mention a lot of materials costs. I think I'll stick to the $20/pair ones and my cheap platform. :D

(update) I carefully taped down zip cord (aka lampshade cord, or "the cheap-ass speaker wire from Radio Shack") between the rows and columns of buttons in order to provide registration marks (which greatly improved my accuracy, though I still have to occasionally look down to see where my feet are so it's not totally "cheating"). However, this step makes pad replacement that much more difficult, since it makes for more tape which has to be removed before a faulty pad can be pulled out. Oh well.