Getting close to the finish line...controls question

[fjser]

So - i have finally finished my racing cab, and the software/front end is up and running with all the controls configured.  All my systems are running fine, but I do have a question on optimizing analog controls on mame. I have read threads asking about details on the analog controls menu in mame, most say to read the stickined post, but all i see there is a recommendation to set wheel sensitivity between 150 and 200. I have done tbis, and controls seem OK, but still not overall good for me. Part of it may be my lack of familiarity with old racers, but was hoping I could run a few questions by the "experts" to help me dial things in.

To clarify - I have a logitech g29 wheel set to default sensitivity (50%) and wheel range set to 270 degrees (except hard/race driving, which I have set to 900 degrees). Also have the value in mame ini (deadzone i think?) set to 0.05 as recommended.

Questions:

1) Should i raise or lower the sensitivity inside the logitech profiler software for the wheel?

2) When i adjust wheel sensitivity, I am not sure I am seeing much a change in game.  Can someone explain what difference i should see setting this value to the lowest (0) versus the highest (255)?  Does higher mean that turning the wheel has a greater affect in game?

3) Should i be messing with any other settings in the analog menu in mame?  related to wheel/paddle i mean?

4) for those who play the older games, particularly f1 games, do you find you need to make tiny wheel movements to adjust car direction? If i go over half way to left or right on 270 wheen settings, my car will go out fo control.

Thanks for any help you can give...

[BadMouth]

1) Should i raise or lower the sensitivity inside the logitech profiler software for the wheel?

Haven't messed with this stuff for a while, but pretty sure I kept my logitech wheels at 100% in Windows/profiler.
Adjusting it there will have an effect on all games though.

2) When i adjust wheel sensitivity, I am not sure I am seeing much a change in game.  Can someone explain what difference i should see setting this value to the lowest (0) versus the highest (255)?  Does higher mean that turning the wheel has a greater affect in game?

I don't know exactly what it does from a software standpoint, but it's easier to see the effects on the analog positional gun games that used potentiometers.  With the sensitivity set low, the crosshairs will lag behind the gun movement.  Set properly, it tracks the gun movement smoothly.  Set too high, it makes the crosshairs jittery because MAME is reacting to every slight change.

For optical encoders, the sensitivity adjustment is a scaling factor to adjust for the original games having various resolution encoders.  i.e. if an original game had a 300 count optical encoder, but you want to play it with your new 1200 count spinner, you'd set the sensitivity to 25%.
It's doing something equivalent for analog controls, but I'm not sure exactly how.

3) Should i be messing with any other settings in the analog menu in mame?  related to wheel/paddle i mean?

I assume you already adjusted saturation, but since you didn't mention it....make sure that is set to 1 in mame.ini.
Saturation is basically how far you have to turn the wheel before MAME sees it as being turned 100% in that direction.
If you set it to 50%, MAME is going to see the wheel as being all the way left when it is only turned halfway to the stops.
Any point between that and the stops is just going to register as 100% turned.

4) for those who play the older games, particularly f1 games, do you find you need to make tiny wheel movements to adjust car direction? If i go over half way to left or right on 270 wheen settings, my car will go out fo control.

This could be a problem with saturation settings, that the game was meant to be played with a 360 degree optical wheel, or that games were just a lot harder back then.
What particular game?

Also, be aware that you might have individual ini files for each game overriding the mame defaults.
IIRC they are either in the ini folder or cfg folder.  It's been an eternity since I set MAME up.