So,
Gingerballs made me realize I need to build a vpin. Thanks, Malenko.
Mimic is slick and I'm happy with it - but as a stand-up machine, with the basic joystick and buttons, it doesn't do driving games well.
I'm on a budget. I have a small house.
So I got to thinking.
A full size vpin needs a burly computer with a good 3D vidcard, and a huge monitor for a playfield in portrait, and a big footprint.
A driving cab, or sim pit, needs a burly computer with a good 3D vidcard and a huge monitor for a front window in landscape, and a big footprint.
If those were the same, it could save me a fair chunk of money and a lot of square feet of floorspace.
We had a thread here a little while back bemoaning the death of innovation, and I object to that.
Mimic is every upright cab I need, horizontal or vertical, and does a great job at that. Could one other thing cover the rest?
(I've got a wager with NotThatJennifer regarding what the overall reception here to the idea will be - we'll see who's right.)
So, I've got this idea. I'm gathering parts toward building it. Figure I'll show you all, and see what you think. It doesn't have a name yet. Lots of renders coming up. No sawdust yet.
When you're playing the thing like a pinball machine, it looks like this.
It's mostly a vpin machine, except for a 2" tall deck with rails on the sides of it that you can walk on, off to the right. Three monitors, 16:10 backglass, 4:3 sideways DMD, 16:9 42" TV playfield, nothing crazy.
Yet.
From the side, it looks like this.
Everything that isn't very vpin-like stows between the legs. You don't end up with a full height pinball cabinet, but I think the shapes still suggest the right silhouette pretty well. But that's just, like, my opinion, man, I know.
There's clearance behind it to still get to my crawlspace, that's the door behind the backbox. But that sharply limits the max depth the thing can have front-to-back.
So, this is the basic idea of the thing, in it's stowed / vpin position.
But.
It's motorized. There's a 8" throw linear actuator under that playfield, on a bell crank. The axle is rotated 3' counterclockwise and inclined 3', and the monitor is mounted to that axle rotated 3' clockwise and inclined an additional 3', so in this mode, it's 6' inclined, but when the axle rotates 90 degrees on the actuator under it, and when the other motor pushes the seat back 50" and the midstage arm back 24"... well, this happens.
(The sequencing of the motors and safeties is done by the host PC. I plan to use an Ultimarc Ultimate IO to check positional limit switch inputs and drive relays to run the actuators.)
Once it's out in driving mode, the front-end I'll write will switch from giving the menu on the backglass, to giving the menu on the main screen, and it's a sim pit. Heights and reaches to seat, screen and controls are pretty close to other racing games I've measured. The seat will be adjustable fore-aft independent of everything else.
There's plenty of room to get into it, unlike some racing cabs and my first stab at a sim-pit a few decades ago.
When you're behind the controls, should look something like:
There's gotta be some relays to flip the audio from the backbox speakers left-right, to the newly exposed speakers in the front and back cabinet boxes, to keep stereo positioning working right. But the PC can fire that relay while it's doing the transform sequence in either direction, I figure.
Anyway, this is what I'm thinking. This is to be the thing that does everything
Mimic can't do well - Afterburner, Hard Drivin', Outrun, SF Rush, Daytona USA, Star Wars, some flight sims, and a selection of maybe twenty vpin tables.
I have not gone deep into the weeds on how all the bearings and actuators and so on work in this post, because I figure there's no point going into all that if the initial reaction to the design as a whole turns out to be "Dear god what is that unholy thing".
Opinions?