___ ___ ______ __
|_ _|_ _| _ \ \/ /
beatmania | | | || | | \ / is probably my
| | | || |_| / \ favorite game
|___|___|____/_/\_\
Seriously. I love Beatmania IIDX. This game, along with Sound Voltex and DDR are pretty much the only reasons I still have to interact with Konami (it is a constant shame that they decided that maintaining their brands and contiuing with ensuring customer goodwill was a mistake).
It just feels good to play, you know? It's hard, but it's a good kind of hard. You're just given a set of buttons to press and you have to just do it. Each keypress makes a sound, so you're very literally playing the song as you play. This feature (called keysounding) is really, really cool and I absolutely love it (except when I'm playing BMS songs at home, where audio latency is a pain).
Give it a shot! Maybe check out IIDX.org first so you know what to do when starting out (in particular, how to position your hands (I do something slightly different than shown, I use middle/index/thumb for keys 1/2/3, since it's easy to pivot between that to free my pinky for scratching, but you should figure out a playstyle you like and stick with it so you actually memorize where the keys are), enabling fast/slow display, and changing the scroll speed are absolutely vital).
If you have a Round 1 location near to you, they should have IIDX available. For home play, there are the PS2 releases for the easiest way to play officially without spending a bunch and you can get everything you need for less than $100, a PS2 IIDX controller and a legit copy of the game combined and shipping should be that much. Konami also has a subscription service you can use to play on PC that's like $15 a month and you need a PC IIDX controller (do NOT buy the Konami one, again, check IIDX.org for what controller to get). I don't personally recommend that option, but it's there.
For less official ways... well, there's BMS (Be-Music Source), a format used by clone games on PC. This guide will set you up with Beatoraja, a modern BMS player written in Java. This link features a decent selection of songs to get started playing. If you're interested in downloading ripped versions of official IIDX songs, please take note that Beatoraja does in fact check against an internal database of ripped songs and will refuse to start if it detects them. It doesn't catch everything, but it does catch a lot.
There are also just outright rips of the arcade game program data since modern arcade games just run on PC. I cannot help you find them, but they're out there. Take note that one of the easiest to find versions of the game (an earlier IIDX 30 update) will probably just randomly crash on you (which apparently isn't related to the game crack, this allegedly was a problem in arcades), and the game will also definitely crash on you at random if you run it in windowed mode, so leave it configured to be fullscreen...
Grab a buddy (ideally, someone who is not the same handedness as you are since IIDX cabs are set up for left-hand and right-hand play) and expereince TWO TURNTABLES, TWO SETS OF SEVEN KEYS, assuming you're in the arcade or have a dual-turntable setup. Or do it all yourself and impress everyone around you. I'm not actually good enough to do double play, compounded by the fact that I don't have a setup at home where I could practice due to having only one turntable controller... but it sure sounds cool, you know? Most players just use normal 7 key/1 turntable mode.
At some point, I kind of want to throw together some plans for an extremely low-effort all button controller with cheap, easily found 24mm and 30mm buttons for everything so that everyone can play without spending too much money or effort, just drill some holes in a wooden box and connect a Pi Pico with some generic controller firmware. It'll probably just be a .dxf file with some circles in it, but those circles will be properly placed.
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