MAME32 w/ PC steering wheels

[bfeur666]

hello everyone - this is my first post so be nice  

Has anyone out there successfully gotten a PC steering wheel to work with MAME32 (ver .57 - .59)?   I have a Thrustmaster Charger steering wheel that works fine in PC games but I can't seem to map the gas pedal control within MAME32.  The steering work but the pedals won't.  Is this a MAME issue,  a wheel issue or what?  I've tried everything and I'm out of ideas.  

Incidently, when I try to go into the config menu with the TAB key and set Pedal 1 it is just ignoring my inputs and the field stays blank.    Any suggestions are appreciated.

[Donor]

I'm not sure if this will help ya or not but here goes, I recently bought a pc game controller that had software with that would allow you to map keystrokes thru your controller. The program would run it the windows background, all you would have to do is make button 1=ctrl, 2=alt and so on. So when I went into mame and hit button 1 it saw the alt key. I don't know if your steering wheel came with software like this or if you could find somthing on the net?

[Lilwolf]

I have in the past.  I had it setup as a joystick to get it working.  Make sure you have in your mame.ini the joystick=1  (or makek6.ini if you are running mamek6.exe... that one caught me a few days ago)

Anyway, the trouble with pc steering wheels is they don't rotate like the originals.  Most arcade racing games you can fully spin the wheel around multiple times.  I've never seen a PC steering wheel that worked like this.

btw, I bought 5 steering wheels on ebay for about 15 bucks each.  I haven't hacked them yet since I don't have time... but hopefully soon.  I still need an encoder wheel to hack it to a mouse (you can make one from a CD)

[u_rebelscum]

hello everyone - this is my first post so be nice  

Has anyone out there successfully gotten a PC steering wheel to work with MAME32 (ver .57 - .59)?   I have a Thrustmaster Charger steering wheel that works fine in PC games but I can't seem to map the gas pedal control within MAME32.  The steering work but the pedals won't.  Is this a MAME issue,  a wheel issue or what?  I've tried everything and I'm out of ideas.  

Incidently, when I try to go into the config menu with the TAB key and set Pedal 1 it is just ignoring my inputs and the field stays blank.    Any suggestions are appreciated.

I have a (cheap) Saitek R100 PC steering wheel + pedals that works in mame.  One question about your Charger: can you split the pedals so the gas and brake are on different axis?  I don't think mame handles this well.  

If possible, try setting the pedals so they are "combined", ie: share the Y axis.  (My pedals cannot be spilt, and are always combined.)

Can you post if this is true or false?  I'd like to know before getting a higher quality set of pedals.  Thanks

[Lilwolf]

analog mame is the continuation of pedal mame that took care of a ton of steering wheel troubles.  Take a look at it

[bfeur666]

thanks for all of the responses everyone!   I found and tried that Analog+ version of MAME (http://www.urebelscum.speedhost.com/download.html) and that seemed to do the trick for me.   I don't know the answer to the split pedal axis question from u_rebelscum but all I can tell you is that with the regular version of MAME32, the key configuration window won't register my pedals when I press them (like where you would normally hit a key to reassign the game controls).    The Analog+ version works fine.   However, as others have noted, I don't get 100% satisfaction out of the PC wheel since it doesn't do 360 degrees.  It works decently for Pole Position but for games such as Sprint or similar where you would just sping the wheel in one direction, a PC wheel is just too awkward.  I wonder if it's possible to make a PC wheel work without the tension (ie, take parts out to be able to spin it all the way around).   It might just be easier to buy a real arcade wheel and interface it.

[Lilwolf]

thats why you buy a polepostion wheel on ebay.  I got a few (3 I think) for 15 bucks each.  I also have a few others I got (I bid on many... didn't think I would get them all.... doh!)

I haven't hacked them yet since I didn't have a good way to hack them.  The encoder wheel is broken on them and I need to make one.  Plus I didn't have the board.  And I fried my optipac... IE, not having much luck

now I'm going with a USB mouse hack and hopefully I will have them working soon

[u_rebelscum]

[snip]... all I can tell you is that with the regular version of MAME32, the key configuration window won't register my pedals when I press them (like where you would normally hit a key to reassign the game controls).    The Analog+ version works fine.

Maybe the driver for your wheel is not directX5 compatible, since the official mame is compiled in dX5 and Analog+ is compiled in dX8.  I don't think I made other changes that would let your pedals work while the official mame doesn't.  Just a guess, though, so I might be wrong.