steering wheel for driving games

[exibar]

I have a steering wheel that I'd like to hook up to my cab for driving games.  But, I'd like to hook it up to my Optipac, second player trackball or spinner controller as at the moment I"m not making use of them.

  Is it possible to switch the driving games, Pole Position for example, to respond to the player 2 controller instead of the player 1 side of the controller?

  I have an idea to make the steering wheel hook onto the cab in like a modular fashion that I think will work nicely.... but if I can't switch players from P1 to P2 as the main player, I won't bother with it....

 thanks!
  Mike B

[u_rebelscum]

 Is it possible to switch the driving games, Pole Position for example, to respond to the player 2 controller instead of the player 1 side of the controller?

Yes (mameFAQ #h3 IIRC, but mame.net is down ATM).  Even though the FAQ only mentions "keys", the differences between "keys", "buttons", joysticks and mouse axes are that mouse need to be moved/spun a good distance but not too fast, joystick needs to be moved far enough, and keys and buttons need to be pressed long enough.

If the page still isn't up: tab, select either "Input (general)" or "Input (this game)" (by pressing enter usually), go to game input, select (aka "enter"), press/move the input you want to map to, wait a sec.  (don't press twice unless you want it to be NOT that key; after first input, press enter and other input if you want another key that does the same thing) Repeat.  Ta-da!

HOWEVER, official mame is not set up to differentiate between different mice axis.  (well, official mame in win9x & ME is not completely set up, while in winXP & 2K it is not at all, period.)  All mice's inputs are combined by windows, and all control player 1 by mame's default.  So your second "mouse" steering wheel defaults to play as player 1, no problem.  The problem, if any, would be getting the first mouse to NOT control player 1 at the same time.


And if you get your steering wheel hooked up as a mouse, could you post how you did it?

(Once I get MameAnalog+ up to date, you could use that to get multiple mice.)

[exibar]

Ahhh, I think I got it....  After reading your response, I realized that I'm not thinking outside of the box and I'm making things more difficult than they should be...

  The Optipac has an option to read Player2 inputs as player1 by moving a jumper.  I could do that.

  OR

  I could simply wire up a molex connector to the steering wheel's encoder board, and the other end to the player1 spinner controller (or one axis on the mouse side).  I won't be using the trackball or the spinner at the same time as the steering wheel so the computer shouldn't care about the input... I hope :-)

   I'll give that a try and see how it goes from there :-)

  Mike B