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Driving Controls Questions...
Cryofax:
--- Quote ---These sites have excellent information on building wheels and hooking them up to the PC (also on wiring pedals using pots).
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brandon:
Hey Rebel since you do this stuff the right way why doesn't Mame Dev. get a clue and incorporate your ideas in to their build?
u_rebelscum:
--- Quote ---Comments and questions for Urebel:
I was planning to switch the pedals to dual axis (actually one of the sites above has a link for doing this with a switch so you can use the pedals either way). I highly recommend using Analog Plus and dual axis so you get working brake lights in OutRun, for example. Comments on this approach?
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Having a switch from twopedal/shared axis to dual pedal/duel axis is a great idea. Most PC retail dual pedals have a software switch like this if they can do separate pedals.
The lastest release Analog+ (v.60.3) added support dual pedals, but I haven't made changes to the drivers yet. So if you want dual pedals now, you need to edit the drivers and compile Analog+ yourself. Or you can wait a little while for the next version (unless mame .61 comes out first, then you might have to wait until Analog+ v.61.2)
--- Quote ---Question 2: Most of the sites above tend to show the pedals hooked up to the gameport, however, it would be possible to interface to USB via 1-Up's Dual Strike Hack. I was planning to leave them as a gameport connection, but I was wondering, (other than HotSwappabilty and forward compatibility), is there any advantage to going USB. (I.e. Do USB controls maintain calibration better than the gameport, etc??)
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USB vs gameport:
1. USB is newer
2. USB might have less stable drivers because it is newer. Depends on your system, MB, joystick, & OS.
3. Most USB joysticks are "calibrated" each time you plug it in (probably at boot time, too). Not total calibration, but the middle is re-calibrated. Don't know about gameport.
4. USB has better support for multiple & multiple brand joysticks plugged in at same time.
5. USB has no dos support.
I run into #2 so often I can't push USB as the fixall for everyone, but it does look like it will take over the game port at some point. So it depends on your system and how much points #2 - 5 matter to you [shrug]
--- Quote ---Hey Rebel since you do this stuff the right way why doesn't Mame Dev. get a clue and incorporate your ideas in to their build? after all aren't they all about faithfully emulating the original? How original is it if it doesn't work?
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Four Reasons:
1. Analog+ has some very dirty code, relies on some hacks in some areas (against mame philosophy), increases playing the games more than helping document them, and a lot of the code is OS dependent (mame wants to be portable).
2. Some of the code that is not OS dependent breaks some mame core functions, braking all ports I don't supply fixed code for. It's still changing often, and you see it would brake the ports each time a new version is released if it included the changed Analog+ code.
3. Even if the code is cleaned up, the hacks are changed to true emulation, and mame + mame:Analog+ code is portable as before, changes to the core is like playing with fire. Changes to one driver or OS code only can break that driver or OS. Changes to the core can break everything if there is some bad code. So mameDev should add core changes carefully.
4. I have not yet submitted very much of the code because of the above points. :-/ I plan to submit as much of the code as possible, but I want it to be working and don't want #3 to happen. I think I have another part that is almost ready for submitting, but I need to test it a little more.
It's not MameDev's fault. You can "blame", if blame's the word, me. And MameDEV's intelligence. ;)
--- Quote ---Anyways keep up the great work. Analog+ rocks!
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Thanks! :)
Tiger-Heli:
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Having a switch from twopedal/shared axis to dual pedal/duel axis is a great idea.
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u_rebelscum:
--- Quote ---For manual calibration, the normal windows procedure is center stick, click button 1, rotate stick through full range of travel, recenter stick, click button 1 again, as best I recall. A pedal is essentially a zero-button, single or dual axis joystick. How do I click button 1? Or do I need to add a dummy button to the pedals just for calibration?
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You can also press enter or have the mouse cursor click the "next" button. No need for buttons if you don't want to.
--- Quote ---Also, for each axis, I will consider the bottom or left-most point 0 and the top or right-most point 10, with 5 being dead center.[snip]
In dual axis mode, I assume the gas pedal starts with the Y-axis at 0. Flooring the pedal moves the pointer to 10. The brake pedal starts with the X-axis at 0 and flooring it moves the pointer to 10. Flooring both pedals would move both axes to 10. In this case, there is no definite midpoint and not much meaning to it anyway. It seems like this would make it very hard to calibrate since you don't know exactly where mid-travel is?
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I think the "center" should really be called "default location". So for the dual mode, the "center" for the start and end the calibration is both pedals all the way up. I'm not positive about this, but from what I know of windows and directX, it sounds the only way retail PC pedals could be calibrated. I might be wrong...
Okay, I tried this on my shared axis pedal. I only pressed the gas pedal so the range was for "center" to gas all the way down. The gas pedal worked with the default at the bottom, but when I slowly pressed the pedal, first it jumped to the middle before acting like an analog device as it should. But I didn't change the driver or driver settings, and there looks like dual pedal support in winMe (my OS) default drivers (I'd need a dual pedal device to really test it though).