Star Wars Yoke: Only Center to left movement on X axis

[HomemadePC]

OK, in a nut shell, I am trying to make a SW Yoke for mame using PVC, AKA Twistygrip.  I have my two 100K pots hacked into the joy port and I am only getting movement from center to right in the x axis.  I am getting full range on the Y.  I switched the pots and I still get center to right only movement on the x.  I am using MAME 0.37B7 in pure DOS with an FE of Arcadeos 2.5.  My SW joystick settings are for a 4 button Joystick.  If anyone has any good info, I would appreciate it.  Ray  

[PoDunkMoFo]

Is your pot at its center position when the yoke is at rest?

[kspiff]

I would probably verify my wiring of the pot..?  Also maybe test the pot with a tool for testing resistance..

Other than that and Po's suggestion, I dunno.. I wasn't really satisfied with the way my TG was turning out and forked out for a real SW yoke.. I find that the creator of the yoke is also rather helpful, you may want to e-mail him if you haven't already as he may know what could cause this to happen.

TG is cool and PVC kind of looks like Stormtrooper armor, but I think it would look out of place on a control panel and wouldn't stand up to nearly as much abuse.  Just my 0.02 for anyone considering doing a TG yoke.

[HomemadePC]

Is your pot at its center position when the yoke is at rest?

Thanks for your reply.  I have not made the yoke yet.  It is still in pieces.  I just hooked the pots directly to the wiring harness.  

[HomemadePC]

I would probably verify my wiring of the pot..?  Also maybe test the pot with a tool for testing resistance..

Other than that and Po's suggestion, I dunno.. I wasn't really satisfied with the way my TG was turning out and forked out for a real SW yoke.. I find that the creator of the yoke is also rather helpful, you may want to e-mail him if you haven't already as he may know what could cause this to happen.

TG is cool and PVC kind of looks like Stormtrooper armor, but I think it would look out of place on a control panel and wouldn't stand up to nearly as much abuse.  Just my 0.02 for anyone considering doing a TG yoke.

Hi, thanks for your reply.  I also have my doubts about the TG controller.  I am changing the design slightly.  I am trying to make the Y turning axis closer to the pivot point.  More wrist less arm action.  I found a cheap Joystick at Walmart that has a throttle control (Saitek ST150?) so I got the wiring harness, 1 100K pot and cool suction cup stand with it.  The stand can be fitted perfectly to a 2" PVC Y.

As I was reading your post,  I will look at the harness again.  There may be some reason why I am only getting the 50K-100K range.  There was a tiny circuit board in the stick, maybe it compensated for something.  Oh well, I will figure it out.  

BTW, my wife and I just had a baby and I can't get "approval" for an $85 Star Wars Yoke from ebay, but I can sneak out to Lowes and stock up on $1 PVC parts and a $10 joystick from Walmart  .   Interesting how it works sometimes.
Thanks again.  Ray

[PoDunkMoFo]

A while back I was looking into building a homemade steering wheel.  I came across this site and many others like it. http://www.gunpowder.freeserve.co.uk/wheels/
A recent post (also on Star Wars yoke) reminded me of the site.
You really don't need anything but the pots to build a Steering wheel (same as a yoke except the gas is on the wheel..sort of).  This site tells you how to wire it.  If your hacked stick has some kind of circuit board you should definately toss it.  A wheel built as the site shows if I remember correctly will use a standard joystick driver.
Hope this helps.

[Karman]

RE: Pole Position pedals - the gas pedal has a pot on it.  Swap it out with a 100K and you can use it through your joystick port.  If you have a sit-down, you also have a brake pedal.  This uses a microswitch, but the pedal and base are identical to the gas pedal.  If you add the spool, cable and spring, you could also make the brake work with a pot to add variable braking.

[PoDunkMoFo]

What he is doing is making a star wars yoke.  I only pointed him to that webpage because it has a lot of relavent info to what he is doing.

[PoDunkMoFo]

Oh.. By the way.  You can pick up pots to build joysticks at Radio Shack very inexpensively.  The pot must be a 100k ohm linear. Linear is important, a lot of pots are audio, you don't want one of those.  I bought one and I think it was like a $1.50

[HomemadePC]

Oh.. By the way.  You can pick up pots to build joysticks at Radio Shack very inexpensively.  The pot must be a 100k ohm linear. Linear is important, a lot of pots are audio, you don't want one of those.  I bought one and I think it was like a $1.50

Thanks for the advice.  I need to check the pot I bought from RS.  I don't think it has anything to do with my problem, but it is an audio pot.  I have decided that I have fried my game port on my sound card.  I did a lot of testing and I shorted a few wires that I should not have shorted.  Oh well, I just picked up a SB16 on Ebay for $1 (+$5 shipping  ).  I am going to concentrate on the physical construction of my yoke.  I have all the pieces , but I just have to put it all together.  Thanks again for all the help.  Ray

[unclet]

OK...I know this is long, but I really tried explain what I am after and it seems you people are dealing with the same topic (ie: connecting multiple axis to the gameport).   Will you please read and help me out......thanks a lot!

<message below>

In the site http://www.gunpowder.freeserve.co.uk/wheels/wiring.htm,
I read about connecting a gas/brake two pedal assembly either in a single-axis (figure 1) or dual-axis (figure 2).  I am getting two gas/brake pedal assemblies (ie: 4 pedals in total) so do you think I could connect one gas/brake assembly in a single-axis format using "J1Y" using pins 6 and 9 (like figure 1) and then connect the second gas/brake assembly in a dual-axis format using "J2X" and "J2Y" using pins 11 and 13?  Also, I hope to attach my 4-speed shifter (ie: 4 microswitches) to pins 2, 7, 10 and 14 (ie: Btn0, Btn1, Btn2 and Btn3 respectively).  Also, my steering wheel potentiometer will attach to pins 1 and 3 (as stated in figure 1).

Regarding my pedals....I am not trying to get two players to play at the same time.  Basically, I know some games call for three pedals (ie: Race Drivin', Hard Drivin', etc..) so I wanted to have at least 3 pedals.  I found a deal on two gas/brake virtua racing pedal sets which I am going to purchase so this gives me 4 pedals in all.  After reading the informarion at the website listed above, it seems like some games call for single-axis and some dual-axis so I want to have both type sets.  The website shows how to connect two pedals to a switch to allow for single-axis and dual-axis within one gas/brake pedal set, but since I am getting two gas/brake pedal sets anyway, it seems I would not need the switch.  I could simply wire one pair of pedals to be single-axis and the other as dual-axis so I could use the one pair to play the games which call for single-axis games and the other pair to play dual-axis games.  For the games which call for three pedals, I would believe (but PLEASE CONFIRM) that I could use one set of pedals plus only one pedal from the second set (ie: I could use the dual-axis set plus one pedal from the single-axis set (or vice versa)).

My question is will all of my pedals and buttons be interpreted by Mame32 successfully using the pin configurations stated above?  I mean will Mame somehow be able to allow me to play driving games with my pedals by getting inputs in either of the J1Y J2X and J2Y pins?  Obviously I want to make sure Mame32 will work before I  go through this effort....

I was going to hack two mice to for spinners in Mame32 but I found out that Mame32 could not intepret the Y-axis mouse input so I only made one spinner hack for the X-axis.  I am not sure whether this same concern (ie: Mame32 not register Y-axis input) is a problem for gameport input.....In my description above, I would be utilizing the J1X and J1Y inputs of the gameport.  Please help me figure whether this stuff will work before I buy all my driving assembly parts....

Thanks
UncleT

[u_rebelscum]

unclet, see my answer in your original post http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=4912  

Also, such a long post in another's thread when you already have your own post is a little, umm, big.  Could you next time do a sentence discribing your quesiton and a link to your post.  You can link by just cut-n-pasting the url of your post from the address box in your browser; this message board will link it for you.  If your question was not as big, there's not as much a problem.  But still, with a central post, people trying to answer your question will see what others already wrote, and not spend time rewriting it.  Thanks.

[unclet]

I can definitely do that...sorry about that...I am pretty new to these forums.