RC Gun Type Controller Hacks for Mame Driving?

[8BitMonk]

I'm wondering if anyone has seen a good RC gun type controller (below) hack to mod it for use as a controller for mame driving game. I've seen controller pieces used on a mini Daytona cab (the foam wheel) but never a full project making an actual driving controller. I have some interesting ideas for this but want to make sure I'm not reinventing the um... wheel.



Probably not for the racing cab purist but it seems like it'd be a good alternative way to control mame driving games. More natural than a spinner or gamepad and a better level of control.

I also know you can hook up an actual RC transmitter to Win 7 and have it show up as a gaming device with usb product that connects to the receiver, anyone tried this with mame?

[SailorSat]

Go for it!

[8BitMonk]

Whoa, cool, hadn't seen that before. I think an RC controller for Mame is more (though just barely) within my capabilities. 

[Fursphere]

Would work pretty good if you mount a spinner in the controller...

[8BitMonk]

That's my idea, a wireless Logitech m507 to be exact. The Logitech mice with the 'hyperscrolling' scrollwheels in them spin forever like an actual spinner and have a great level of precision. The marathon was the cheapest version I could find that has the hyperscrolling at $36.

I was thinking I can take an RC controller wheel (or wheel from a car) with the foam padding and mount it so it somehow turns the scroll wheel. Unfortunately the scrollwheel doesn't look like it can be moved from the PCB so I probably have to find a way to spin it by something flush mounted up against it.



If I can't rig it to fit in a gun type controller I thought maybe I'd mount it in a small CP where the top part of the foam wheel sticks out the top about a 1/4". Then you'd just brush your hand left to right over the top of it to steer. The part under the CP would be on an axle and under that it would butt up against the top of the scroll wheel which would be firmly mounted.

For the throttle trigger and buttons for gears I was thinking about hacking a Logitech wireless gamepad since it'd use the same wireless unifying receiver. Would be completely wireless, battery operated mame driving controller.

[BadMouth]

IMO, it would make a lot more sense to use a potentiometer and leave the return to center spring in place.
I'd hack a gamepad.

I've wanted to try this, but was afraid the cheap remote I would buy would just have switches instead of real analog control.

[chopperthedog]

OR, you can just find one of these!!    I've had this thing for about 12 years and love it. With a play station to usb adapter it works great with mame. The wheel is force feedback and centering is done by the motor. Also dual potentiometer triggers for gas and brake along with internal rumble motor. I've had a couple other models in the past that felt like centering was done with a rubber band. Great controller if you can find one.


good day.

[8BitMonk]

Cool, thanks for sharing, I had no idea they made a PS1 RC type controller. Good luck finding them though, a quick web search pulled up nuthin.

[BadMouth]

There were some cool analog controllers for the PS1, but no consistency in implementation or compatibility.
People forget that the system came out in 1995, but the dual analog pad wasn't released until 1997 and the dual rumble pad wasn't released until 1998.
So hardly any of the games from 95-97 support analog control.

There are a few games that were made for use with special controllers, but the crazy part is that not all will work with analog controllers other than the specific one they were designed for.

The Namco NeGcon was released in 1995 at system launch for use with Ridge Racer.
You twist the controller to steer.


Sony Analog Joystick - April 1996


Sony Dual Analog Controller - August 1997
(you know what they look like)

Sony Dual Shock Controller - May 1998 (rumble)
(you know what they look like)

Namco JoGcon - 1998 Packaged with Ridge Racer Type 4 - Featured full directional force feedback
Interesting....the sucker was actually optical: http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/382-Namco-JogCon


I'd never seen the one chopperthedog posted.
Guess I need to add it to my list and find out some history on it. 

chopperthedog, I thought RR Type 4 was the only PS1 game to have real directional ffb.
Does it work with other games, or just rumble?

[8BitMonk]

IMO, it would make a lot more sense to use a potentiometer and leave the return to center spring in place.
I'd hack a gamepad.

My initial motivation for this was a more viable way to play Sprint with a couple friends so something with a 360 spin is what I was going for. I did pick up a couple junk used RC wheel mechs with the center spring still attached to them from the local hobby shop for expirimenting though.

For the wheel spin I'm trying a couple different things:
1.) Put 2 foam RC Wheels on an axle, the outer wheel is used to steer and the inner wheel is flush mounted up against the scroll wheel on the mouse so it turns as you turn the outer wheel.
2.) Instead of an inner wheel use a washer or something on the end of the shaft from the outer wheel to spin in front of the optical sensor and not use the scroll wheel.
3.) Similar to #1 above but instead of an RC type housing, mount the foam wheel so half of it sticks out of the top of a small controller box with the axle and mouse underneath where you can't see them. You'd steer by swiping left and right.

For any of the above a trigger would come from an anolog gamepad or stick, preferably wireless.

On a side note, anyone who hasn't tried a Logitech Marathon mouse for spinner or 360 type driving games should give it a try. I was having a blast playing Sprint with it the other day. I just took the cover off the mouse and then stuck it to a square coaster with some poster tack so it was easier to hold on to. I used a set of usb pedals I had for the gas, held the mouse in my left hand while using the exposed scroll wheel to steer with a couple fingers on my right hand like a mini steering wheel. The thing is weighted really well and feels very natural, it spins forever and you have an amazing level of control. You can give it a rapid spin to whip around the corner like you would with the real deal, I was able to drive as well as I can on a normal cab. It's a great budget spinner substitute.
 

[8BitMonk]

chopperthedog, I thought RR Type 4 was the only PS1 game to have real directional ffb.
Does it work with other games, or just rumble?

Tough to find info on these, the full name is the Logic 3 Top Drive Reactor, found this mini-review:
http://www.gamevortex.com/hr_topdrivereactor.html

They seem to be more prevalent overseas, getting more hits on European sellers. Lucked into one on ebay so I'm going to check it out.

[8BitMonk]

Here's my first prototype. I bought a basic electric junction box with rigid plastic from Home Depot and cut 2 sides off to make room for the mouse. Then I used a threaded bar for the axle, some nylon spacers for it to spin in and to keep the outer wheel off the side of the box and acorn nuts to cap the ends. The mouse is just held in place with some poster tack on the bottom for the time being which actually works well because you can adjust how close the mouse scrollwheel is to the RC wheel and there's a little give.

It isn't pretty or compact yet by any means and doesn't look like an RC controller but it works really well. Pic's and vid below.

[Fursphere]

Cool, thanks for sharing, I had no idea they made a PS1 RC type controller. Good luck finding them though, a quick web search pulled up nuthin.

There are three of them on eBay right now...

Search for "TopDrive Reactor" - They look to be about $30 US ea

[8BitMonk]

There are three of them on eBay right now...

Search for "TopDrive Reactor" - They look to be about $30 US ea

Yeah those are from Germany, I was able to get a couple from within the U.S. already. Skeptical about how well they'll work, we'll see. I know the steering is restricted and not 360 which is one of the things I was looking for.

[Fursphere]

oh right.   Good point.    I forgot you wanted 360 wheels...

[8BitMonk]

Got my Logic 3 Top Drive Reactor yesterday and had a chance to play around with it, interesting controller for mame.

A couple observations:

• There are a lot of buttons and you can easily change the mappings using the controller itself. Ie. the throttle (z-index) is set to L2 and R2 by default and you can change that to be the triggers instead.
• The triggers don't appear to be analog, only the wheel.
• The wheel turns almost one complete rotation, there is some resistance that feels almost like the light clicking of a scroll wheel though it has some weight to it. The wheel is not on spring that snaps back to center. You can change the wheel sensitivity + or -2 with a switch on the controller.

Though it's not ideal for 360 type games like Super Sprint I could tell from testing it that the RC controller form factor would work well as a driving controller for those type of mame games. Other than the fact that the wheel didn't spin freely it felt natural for steering and throttle control.

[8BitMonk]

Just picked up one of these for $14 to use as a base for my hack.



http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJT2JZI

Can't go wrong for 14 bucks, easy to gut and use some of the components. The trigger has a pot I'm hoping to hack to one of the the optical mouse axis'. Anyone know if this is possible? the base also has 4 battery slots which I'm thinking I can use for the wireless mouse batteries. I'll probably end up doing some sort of optical encoder wheel hack for the steering rather than an inner wheel physically moving the scroll wheel like pictured above, not sure I'd have room inside. 

[PL1]

The trigger has a pot I'm hoping to hack to one of the the optical mouse axis'. Anyone know if this is possible?

You'll need an analog encoder like KADESTICK, A-Pac, or U-HID Nano for the potentiometer, not an optical encoder.


Scott

[8BitMonk]

Thanks for the clarification PL1, I had only worked with keyboard encoders thus far in my arcade builds.

Since it looks like the analog encoders are all wired (and one of my mandates for this controller is to be wireless) I'm thinking the easiest thing to do then is going to be to grab the analog triggers from a wireless gamepad. This starts to get expensive though as the choice is basically an Xbox or Logitech wireless gamepads at $50.

Guess I could try something like this: http://www.amazon.com/AESTAR-Universal-Wireless-Vibration-Controller/dp/B00M7N6PGQ/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1416439177&sr=8-7&keywords=wireless+gamepad

Appreciate any better suggestions if something comes to mind.

[BadMouth]

Hacking a cheap gamepad is the best route IMO.
I haven't come across a modern USB gamepad that didn't use 10k potentiometers.
When centered they show as 5k. 
Some (like the xbox controllers) work off voltage and will work with other values, but most work off the resistance.
Most don't give you the option to calibrate in Windows anymore.

In summary: Hack a gamepad and use 10k resistors, make sure they register 5k while at rest.

[8BitMonk]

Thanks for the input.

I busted open the Himoto controller last night and found that the wheel and the trigger both use pots that easily unplug from the circuit board, they're plugged in with a little three hole connector on a ribbon cable. So it seems the easiest hack would be to get something like a U-HID and just hook both pots up to it and forget about the controller being wireless.

That still leaves an issue with the wheel being on a spring, having restricted rotation, when I'd prefer it spin freely. If I wanted to keep the wheel 360 I guess I could still go with a wireless mouse hack, an encoder wheel at the end of the shaft inside the housing and a scavenged mouse pcb with optical sensor. I don't suppose there's any way you know of to use the pcb and optical sensors from a wired mouse and attach it to the U-HID or similar device? A wired mouse would be the cheapest route to an optical input but I don't want two usb plugs coming out of the controller. 

So to recap, my options as I see them are:

• U-HID for both pots and done - controller isn't wireless and doesn't have 360 wheel rotation
• U-HID for trigger, wireless mouse hack for wheel - controller isn't wireless, Relatively expensive
• Hacked wireless gamepad for trigger, hacked optical mouse - wireless, relatively expensive, making the gamepad trigger unit fit and function in the Himoto case may be a pain

[BadMouth]

a U-HID can handle input from an optical encoder.  You'd just need to swap out the pot for an optical encoder (wheel and board).
I'm not sure if the UHID nano one has enough inputs to do a digital, analog, & still have enough buttons left over.
IIRC, it only has 8 pins.

They make optical encoders that would drop right in place of a pot, but they're expensive.
Sparkfun sells some cheap 12 or 16 counts per revolution.  That's too low of a count to even register in some games.

If you have a good understanding of how optical encoders work, you could theoretically hack off a little section of the mouse board containing the emitters/sensors and use that with the U-HID.  You just need to run power the emitter side (the U-HID can power it) and then run the sensor side to the U-HID inputs.

[8BitMonk]

a U-HID can handle input from an optical encoder.  You'd just need to swap out the pot for an optical encoder (wheel and board).
I'm not sure if the UHID nano one has enough inputs to do a digital, analog, & still have enough buttons left over.
IIRC, it only has 8 pins.

The potentiometer connector just has 3 pins, is it one for each direction plus a ground? And wouldn't that be the same for the optical encoder, one for each direction? If that's the case it seems like there would be enough.

They make optical encoders that would drop right in place of a pot, but they're expensive.
Sparkfun sells some cheap 12 or 16 counts per revolution.  That's too low of a count to even register in some games.

I see the 12 counts are just a couple bucks, too bad they're too low. I see the more expensive one's you're talking about, looks like about $30-40 for the better ones. Cool site btw, hadn't seen it out before.

If you have a good understanding of how optical encoders work, you could theoretically hack off a little section of the mouse board containing the emitters/sensors and use that with the U-HID.  You just need to run power the emitter side (the U-HID can power it) and then run the sensor side to the U-HID inputs.

This would be a tricky for me, my level of knowledge is pretty basic. It may just be better (cheaper/easier) for me to eat the cost of a small wireless mouse and use the optical components. I'm a little worried about aligning the encoder wheel and it skipping when spun very quickly. That's one good thing about having an inner wheel that physically touches the scroll wheel like in my quick testversion, very reliable, never skips. I have done some expirimenting with a washer spinning directly above the optical sensor and it seems to work ok but it has to be very close.

[PL1]

a U-HID can handle input from an optical encoder.  You'd just need to swap out the pot for an optical encoder (wheel and board).
I'm not sure if the UHID nano one has enough inputs to do a digital, analog, & still have enough buttons left over.
IIRC, it only has 8 pins.

The potentiometer connector just has 3 pins, is it one for each direction plus a ground? And wouldn't that be the same for the optical encoder, one for each direction? If that's the case it seems like there would be enough.

The 3 pins on the potentiometer are Vcc (5v), wiper, ground.

The wiper provides a voltage between 0v and 5v to the encoder. (absolute position)

The gamepads that use a variable resistor configuration only use 2 tabs of the potentiometer -- either 1 and 2 or 2 and 3. (absolute position)

The 4 pins of an optical device are Vcc (5v), ground, Data A, Data B

An optical encoder decodes the quadrature waveforms created when the encoder wheel moves (clockwise rotation shown below) with each transition equalling one step. (relative position)




Scott

[8BitMonk]

Thanks for the additional explanation, this makes it much more clear. So with a single pot and optical device it would take 6 pins total on the U-HID since there is a separate common pin for the ground. That would still leave two pins for buttons if desired since they don't need power?

It seems like a mouse/gamepad hack is still the most sensible way to go. At some point it get's so expensive you might as well just buy an actual spinner.

[PL1]

Thanks for the additional explanation, this makes it much more clear. So with a single pot and optical device it would take 6 pins total on the U-HID since there is a separate common pin for the ground. That would still leave two pins for buttons if desired since they don't need power?

It seems like a mouse/gamepad hack is still the most sensible way to go. At some point it get's so expensive you might as well just buy an actual spinner.

The U-HID Nano has a ground (blue square), 8 programmable pins, and one pin is removed (gray square, no dot) as a key.

 

The ground and 5v can be shared for the pot and optical.

*  Ground
*  5v
*  Analog wiper (pot)
*  Data A (optical)
*  Data B (optical)

That leaves 4 pins available on the Nano.


Scott

[8BitMonk]

Thanks, I was wondering if the power could be shared, thought maybe the voltage factored into the signal and had to be unique for each.

So the U-HID nano would work but I'm not convinced it's worth the cost just to use the existing pot from the RC controller and have analog gas/brake. It's a minimal payoff for the extra money. The gas brake could easily be relegated to a single switch hooked up to a trigger or I could find and hack a wireless gamepad trigger for cheaper.

[PL1]

If you don't mind going with a 270 degree wheel, you could probably hack the wireless gamepad using one analog axis for the wheel and the other for the accelerator.

A while back, I requested a hybrid analog/optical/digital KADE+ or KADESTICK firmware so people can interface with driving cabs that have 360 degree optical wheels, analog pedals, and pushbuttons -- the new KADE+ will have the analog input pins needed to support this type of firmware, but i"m not sure if/when Jon will get around to this.   


Scott

[Deadpool]

I had no idea this was even possible?  Would you connect it through Wifi? or have a connecting cord?