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Help with folding steering wheel project please!
Turnarcades:
Using USB wheels on a MAME build is not difficult and should work just fine. I too have several wheel sets (Gran Turismo force feedback 1, Tevion racer etc.) ready for such builds but not had chance yet. The tricky bit is fitting them in a way that blends into a regular-styled cabinet. I did devise a fairly simple design for a customer for temporary wheel use that worked quite well and looked like any other cabinet in normal use:
You can read about the rest of that build here and although there's no details on software configuration, it may give some inspiration to mod your own cabinet.
Cretster:
Well, the ball is rolling already and it looks like what I want to do, should not actually be tooooo tricky to set up on my cab (more by luck than anything I think!).
I removed a couple of front panels from the front and bottom of the control panel console and it gives good space to test out the idea in principle.
Getting it all spot on will be the tricky part, and then probably harder still, making it look ok afterwards!
I let one of the brace panels pivot (it's not very smooth as the pins are not symmetrical) and just clamped the wheel in place.
I think as a VERY rough proof of concept it's a start:
I'll have to experiment with how to get it so it pivots nicely down to be fully out of the way of the front of the cab, then possibly move the front cupboard door bit upwards to cover it up once it's been opened or stashed.
The worst bit I think will be arranging some sort of cutout in the front of the control panel that doesn't look horrible....
I was wondering about a sprung flap that fills the cutout and folds down from the inside of the control panel but probably easier said than done I think.
I don't just want a big hole at the front though really!
Pedals will fit down like this:
The ruler is across a line where I can hack the front of the pedal box off as it was empty apart from a weight. This means it won't protrude past the front of the cab edges, but is nicely positioned for playing.
Here's roughly how the wheel will be positioned:
And more or less how I intend to set it up so that the wheel will simply pivot up or down to lock in position or swing out of the way into the cupboard space in the front of the cab.
This means it'll be hidden for non driving games but have a natural position for playing those driving classics like outrun & chase HQ and erm....... well anyway.... :lol:
Cretster:
Thanks for your input Craig - I actually just linked to your thread in my post prior to yours as I'd been reading the thread and found it an excellent idea for an uncomplicated setup.
I'll probably end up wishing I'd gone with that but I like making thins difficult for myself. ;D
By the way, I hope you don't mind, but the rough outline of my cab was inspired by your 'slimline master' model that I saw on ebay.
I had a wardrobe donated to me with relatively narrow panels, and have to make a wife friendly cab so it looked just about right.
It's probably nowhere near in reality but the overall side profile looked more or less what I wanted.
BadMouth:
google Nebula's Sega Model 2 emulator. It emulates some great 3D driving games from the 90's that MAME does not.
These modern pc wheels work perfect with it. It even has force feedback. Everything is pretty straightforward and easy to configure.
The only oddball thing that might come up is that you have to have to uncheck the "combine pedals" box in windows (control panel>game controllers).
Best to know now, rather than after you've set up the controls in mame with that box checked.
What it does is make the computer see the gas and brake as two different halves of the Y axis instead of separate axes.
Most PC games prefer them combined, but M2 Emulator will not work with them that way.
You can get it to change back and forth with Logitech Profiler, but that's just more time spent configuring.
Cretster:
Thanks for the tip, that sounds worth checking out for sure.
I do want to add I various console emulators too, and already have snes and n64 kind of working, but setting up for ps2 and dreamcast/saturn etc looks like a real pain.
Will get there though. I'm horribly impatient so I constantly have to remind myself to stop and think a bit before charging ahead and messing things up.