I'll have to give Rage Racer more playing time. I settled into RR2 for some reason. Probably a music preference.
Also been playing them on Viva Nonno, so the handling might be night and day between that and MAME.
RR2 has pretty good tunes. The game itself is good but it's more of a RR 1.5 than a true sequel. To me Rave should have been labeled as Ridge Racer 2, as it's much in line with what a true Ridge successor should be.
As for Viva Nonno, Y'know that may in fact be plausible. I haven't fired up Viva in ages but I'll do so later on today just for spits and giggles. Still a bit bitter over the author abandoning it like that but at least we got to play the games many years ago and the emu was ahead of its time. I just wish he'd release the source code or something, that way perhaps Howard could take the reigns as the new dev and put some FFB in that sucker!
I think the handling is screwed up on console games because they were designed for joystick play.
It depends on which console game you're referring to. The earlier RR PS1 and PS2 games have sweet analog steering since they were designed with the NeGcon/JoGcon in mind. I used to play Rage Racer for PS1 until I was blue in the face with a steering wheel and remember thinking to myself
"Geezuz Kreiss....the car handling and drifting in this game is BONKERZ!" I then proceeded to play Type 4 and the drifting felt a bit too on rails. RRV with a wheel(that used the guts of a NeGcon controller) was excellent back then as well.
I think the reason RRV is feeling a bit sloppy at the moment is due to the fact that I'm playing it on the PCSX2 emulator. The emulator is making the game think I'm using a PS2 DualShock wheel when in fact I'm using my wheel via that xinput.dll file my bro gave me. So I think trying to steer properly with the wheel when the game thinks your using an analog stick is culprit of this issue.
Oh well back to playing some more.