I was looking on 5panel.dance to find the best place to download Stepmania simfiles for PIU because I saw that the resistance simfiles released an "XSanity Starter Pack", which modified the charts to include noteskin changes and whatever else that XSanity supports, but the songs that I have were sorted differently for the packs that I currently have downloaded from StepP1+ (i.e. "11030-SWEET WONDERLAND" [XSanity Pack] vs "18252 - SWEET WONDERLAND" [StepP1+ Pack]). While looking around, I found this portion on the file format section of the "Simfiles" page of the site.
"KSF - Not Recommended
Made for Kick it Up, the first known Pump it Up simulator developed and released from 1999 to 2001. Kick it Up was technically an official project, developed by (at the time) members of the PIU development team! VERY outdated though, just including this because it's neat. StepF2/StepP1 support it, if you ever stumble across files for it!"
This was interesting because I've never heard of Kick It Up prior to this, although I know about a lot of other types of Software for Pump It Up:
Stepmania AMX (Not fully sure about this one, I think it's aiming for accuracy and iOS/Android support, haven't tried)
Project Outfox (A.K.A. Stepmania 5.3, it's basically the unified simulator for DMX, BMS, PIU, DDR, Pop'n, ext. Try out Infinitesimal too, it's pretty cool.)
FiveSteps (Android Stepmania PIU Player, it's also pretty cool.)
StepFEX, StepF2 & StepP1 (Same guy made them all but imitating a newer version with it ending on F2 & P1)
StepPrime, StepXX/StepPXX (I think they're interchangable names for the same PIU XX project from StepPrime), PumpSanity, & XSanity (Same team for all of them, StepPrime became PumpSanity when they were done with Prime, then because of a Cease & Decist they got from Andamiro, they became XSanity later on stripping out all AM owned assets and added a native Linux port [I love Linux and I love them.] )
Those immitation Stepmania themes that are on The Internet Archive. (Examples being clones of New Xenesis and Jump, they've got some didication put into them too, the NXA one even has the brainshowers in them too.)
Official PC Versions (The Evolutionary Dance Floor, Fusion, Banya's Collection, Perfect Collection, Prex 3 [The official Pump It Up website says that there was a Premiere 1 PC port, but I'm not fully sure about that. The whole history site is a mess tbh] )
The subsequent "Prexceed" mods which were visual modifications of Phex 3 for the PC because people really liked Prex 3 and I don't blame them. (Examples, examples, examples. [The Internet Archive has a lot of examples.] )
It also seemed interesting because it also predated Stepmania by two whole years according to the NamuWiki article talking about it and the release date of "DDR PC Edition m1" on the StepMania Build Archive. The best info that I could get was that Kick It Up was released in late 1999 (Because 1st released in August of 1999 and NamuWiki only said 1999.) and Stepmania (Or what was known at the time as DDR PC Edition) was released in late August of 2001. So theoretically, Kick It Up could have been released exactly 2 years before Stepmania. It was probably a lot less than 2 years but bread (bigger and more exagerated number) tastes better (looks cooler) than key (smaller, more specific number).
At the time of writing this (I've had a lot of fun doing so), I noticed that there is a second NamuWiki article that has a ton of information into the file system (.ksf) and the history of the game too. I'd reccommend reading the article because what I am going to say is basically just what NamuWiki has said in a more boring way.
The structure to the file system is simaler to .sm and .scc files but a lot more simple, example from NamuWIki:
"#STARTTIME" is basically the equivalent to "#STOPS" in Stepmania, because the output (Example being 100) says how long the chart waits until it plays in milliseconds*10, with 100 being 1 second, 25 being 0.25 seconds, and 1 being 0.01 seconds, so you have 0.01 second persicion compared to the unlimited persicion you get with Stepmania.
"#PLAYER" is to indicate if the chart is "SINGLE" or "DOUBLE". All 13 columns are still needed for the chart to work, though
"#TICKCOUNT" is weird because "4" means that not in the chart is a full note, so the quickest a chart could be is in quarter notes (#TICKCOUNT:1;) unless you were to double the BPM which wouldn't be very fun to play.
There are optional ones that would be automatically be filled to defaults if left blank or if they aren't even there:
"#INTROFILE" is for the preview. It supports .mp3 files or .wav files.
"#SONGFILE" is for the song, same thing as "#INTROFILE".
"#DISCFILE" is for the banner of the song. It supports .png or .bmp files.
"#TITLEFILE" is for the background image, same thing as "#DISCFILE".
"#DIFFICULTY" is self-explanitory but the difficulty only goes up to 10. I noticed that the charts are either labeled as "Hr" (Hard) or "Cz" (Crazy) in this YouTube video
showcasing Kick It Up so it may be dependent on the number. (i.e. 1-2 is Easy, 3-4 is Normal or Regular, 5-7 is Hard, and 8-10 is Crazy,)
There's more stuff but it took me too long to explain those and the others are for time shifts and stops.
Now, with #STEP, you may have noticed that there are 13 columns instead of 10. The reason why is because the last three numbers indicate if the lamps on a dance cabinet were lit or not. The reason why this is there is because the may the ksf files are set up are very simaler to the arcade charts, if not identical because of Kick It Up basically being a PC version of an arcade game already made for Windows with a bit of encription added on top of it. (That's why there were so many official PC versions back in the day, because it was very easy to make it avalable to home players [Before Exceed, where they switched to Linux]).
There are 2 grammars to .ksf files, but because the second grammar is technically for a different game called "Direct Move", I'm not talking about it.
Before Kick It Up version 0.004, .ksf files were actually called .stp files, but they were formatted the same. 0.4a added BGA instertion supporting mpg files, 0.4b added a "shifting function" (not sure what that means), and 0.5589 gave us the last update to the game made by Gi-tae Noh (The original creator of Kick It Up). Later, on "2000/08/05 at 0:00", the game got open-sourced, with the caveat of removed or modified assets.
In the meantime between 0.4a and 0.5589, BGA instertion got removed because computers couldn't handle the raw power of a 500kb .mpg video file. So, a programmer named Doraemon with outside help reimplemented BGA instertaion and added long not funtionality that was first added to the Pump It Up series with Extra. This would be the first, last, and only version of Kick It Up from Doraemon, being refered to as "Kick It Up LN" according to NamuWiki because of the added hold note (Long Note) funtionality. Then, another programmer named Niho removed that 3 tempo shift limit for unlimited shifting. A community website called PK World was later made by someone named ⓩino where you could discuss things related to Kick It Up and the Pump It Up franchise as a whole. Later on, the site blocked the community feature and only allowed downloads to be done on the site. Then, a new community was later made called DDM with the help of ⓩino. Also, the original developer of Kick It Up, Gi-tae Noh, ended up getting a job at Andamiro, yippee! Then (I say "then" too much), the community got devided for some reason and then you had the WKM community and the DDM comunity (idk man, ts makes no sense).
Next, the community began to split more. Some stayed on the hold note version of Kick it Up, some jumped to Direct Move, and the others created crappy Prexceed mods with their friends to play the removed version of "Master of Puppets" by Metallica. New sites were made, Forhythm, Dropnote, The Rhythm, KSF.net, 5kNote, and Creative Rhythm World, which is still up to this day and does seem to still be hosting .ksf charts.
I did mention that Kick It Up was open-sourced; and it is avalible on GitHub, but the assets appeared to be stripped down for legality's sake, removing the assets that make it look good. I also don't know how to compile things either so I haven't played Kick It Up before. I'm looking for a compiled build of the game, either pre-open-source or the Doraemon version, but I haven't gotten any leads. I commented on the latest YouTube video of the guy who posted gameplay of Kick It Up but it's so far down his videos because he posts so much that I bet he hasn't seen it.
Thanks for reading my article, it took me some 2 1/2 hours to write and format (I think, I'm too tired to know but I think I started it at 5:57am and now it's 8:35am.)