UltraStar is a clone of SingStar, a music video game by Polish developer Patryk "Covus5" Cebula.

UltraStar allows several people to play simultaneously by connecting several microphones possibly to several sound cards.

UltraStar comes preloaded with a short sample from Nine Inch Nails hit "Discipline" from The Slip album.

Very old versions were available under GNU General Public License and most game forks were initially based on the old code.

Free songs include: The original UltraStar is programmed in Kylix/Delphi and made for Microsoft Windows operating-system.

After the v1.1 release many developers left the team to work on the new and very similar karaoke games Performous and Vocaluxe.

These projects started as forks from UltraStar Deluxe 1.1 sourcecode and eventually developed many new features and bugfixes.

The project began as rewrite of the UltraStar singing game in October 2006 (first commit on 15-10-2006 11:52 AM UTC [9]), using C++ and targeting Linux.

The project was originally known as UltraStar-NG, but the name was changed in version 0.3 in anticipation of adding other instruments and to avoid confusion as the game is not a fork of UltraStar.

The gameplay is similar to SingStar: the game analyzes each singer's pitch and gives scores based on how precisely the song was performed.

Performous does not attempt to clone SingStar but rather has unique features such as scrolling notes and precise singing pitch display as a wave drawn on screen.

Performous does pitch detection with fast Fourier transform (FFT) combined with a sophisticated post-processing algorithm.

For guitar and bass the game tries to figure out the intention of the player rather than just comparing the nearest available chord, making it easier to play fast passages.

Due to copyright issues and the lack of freely usable songs at the time, part of the demonstration was done with the music completely muted.

[10] On 2014-11-01, Performous released its 1.0 version containing a new engine based on SDL2, the ability to create playlists, and a lot of bug fixes.