New Nano Style Steering Project.

[djlins]

Right then,
I have been wanting to do this for a while so I have finally made the jump and given myself a nice little project for the winter.

I guess first off I'd like to say hi to everyone. This seems like a fantastic forum and I have been reading it for a while now and decided it was time to join (thanks MODs for approving me last night).

So my new project:
I have always loved MAME. I am 36 years old and come from a time where I used to hang around the arcades in the 80's and early 90's as a teenager which I am sure is a similar background to where a lot of the enthusiasts on here come from.

Knowing that my missiz would never let me have a full sized cabinet in the house I have always been limited to keeping my MAME on PC or XBox 1.

More recently I fell in love with the Nanocade idea because as I'm sure a lot of you know being my age group, I also had loads of the Grandstand minicade games like Scramble, Frogger, Astro Wars and Firefox back in the day. To have a tiny cabinet that shaped which can play all arcade games was like a childhood dream come true.
Aside from that I have also been a keen modder for consoles, like putting a 360 into the Millenium Falcon



I also wanted to put a gaming PC into Castle GreySkull because I liked the idea of the drawbridge being a disk tray and giving it loads of eirie LED lights, however I think this new idea is a better one to do first.

So my idea. (please feel free to jump in if you have criticism or better ideas)
I have just gone and bought a childhood driving toy off ebay:
The Tomy Turbo Dashboard:



They seem to be raising in collectable value but luckily I found a non working one for under a tenner.
I have an old laptop that I was going to just rip all the bits out of and stuff in there but since it has turned up I have found that the toy is about half the size of what I remember and the laptop motherboard is WAAAAY to big to fit in there.
The laptop MBoard is about 9" by 7".
So now I guess is where my troubles starts heheh.
measuring the size of the toy, I have about:
depth:4.5" x Width:8.5" x height:about 3.5"
of space to play with to get a PC in there.

The screen is 3.5" diagonal and I have found these screens on ebay with composite plugs and audio:



I was thinking of going down the route of getting me a Mini ITX MBoard and converting the VGA output to composite.
However:
I have since also found that most Mini MBoards are around 6.7" squared so again there is no way I am gonna be able to fit one of those in either.
Hmmmmm - I'll come back to that one:
Does anyone else know of a netbook or MBoard that can go into a 4.5" by 8.5" space?
-
Controller.
I also want to keep the steering wheel and gear shift that is in there because I want it to look how it did, albeit it the screen wont be smoky white. This is a bit of a head scratcher. I was going to just connect them both up to a ball mouse X and Y and feed that into a USB port but I dont think MAME really handles mouse input for driving games well so I would rather butcher an analogue joypad and somehow link the steering and throttle up to the joystick somehow.
Would anyone have any better ideas on steering and throttle controls that I might be better looking at to link these two up to?
The space is too small to buy a full on Logitech wheel and pedals pull the guts out.

Like I say I can see some problems ahead already. and I know from the nanocade that squeezing a MAME carcus into something this small is going to throw up more problems as I come across them, but I am a determined pup so I'm gonna give it a go.

I'll let you all know how it goes and I am sure I will keep pestering you all with questions as and when I get to them.

Cheers for reading.

Right then,
best get started.

L

[EightBySix]

Wow - I remember playing that. I was late applying for a french exchange programme at school, so I had to go and stay at a girl's house. With hindsight, she was lovely, but I was more interested in her Tomy Turbo Dashboard. Innocent days 

Have you considered mame on a pocketpc format? I used to play classics on an old HP PDA with MameCE quite sucessfully. God knows how you would interface an external display though, although maybe a PDA exists with the right screen size to drop right in....

You can get bluetooth game pads for them that might be hackable....
http://pocketnow.com/review/bgp100-bluetooth-gamepad

[uolarethian]

I am thinking your best bet it to look into a Dingoo.  They do mame emulation and also come with AV cables to feed your video screen. Here is a youtube video of some one who put one into a mini arcade cabinet.  I am not sure if you will be able to hook up a steering wheel but then again by the look of that falcon you look pretty handy.

[BobA]

Check out pico itx motherboards.  They are premium priced but I think the form factor will fit.

Pico ITX

[djlins]

Wow I had never heard of Dingoo. That might be a way forward. That youtube video shows it playing Outrun quite smoothly and it says it can handle Finalburn emulator.
Do you know if it is okay with things like Sega Rally or Chase HQ? It just seems a little underpowered.
Looking around there seems to be issues with getting a clean MAME setup going plus the 320 is under 3 inch screen size.

I really love the fact that on the Nanocade setup he uses a totally customisable MAME setup called Mala FE shown here:
http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepnanocade5.htm
It seems with that one he can show marquees, screenshots and game history and I like the idea of that so I think I will stick to the PC motherboard route rather than a Dingoo. Cheers for the reccomendation all the same.

And to Bob. Yes, I have just been reading up on all of that and I think a Nano is the way to go, I am thinking it might offer more speed than a Pico and is still small enough to fit. I just need to find out a little more about them now to see if there are any that dont have the Atom bottleneck of the USB Bus speed that the Mini ITX boards can have.

Cheers all,

I'll keep you posted with the final choice of bits.

Now has anyone got any ideas of how is best to set up that steering wheel? Butcher a USB Ball mouse , or butcher an analogue USB joystick?

L

[NiN^_^NiN]

Nice project I was suggesting the same tommy turbo to the guy who recently made a nano ridge racer as the tommy turbo just seems so suited for outrun

Now Thinking about how you can fit a laptop into this device I had a few different idea's previously

1) Stick a mini ps1 into the unit and run a emulator on the ps1 now I don't know if it has mame but I know it had Sega Master system emulator and that had outrun although not as good as the arcade version.

2) Use a laptop as a base for the tommy turbo have that ontop of the laptop in it's own box and that will give you the extra lift to play easier and also allow you to use the extra size and start at the front of the shifter all the way to the back of the tommy turbo unit. Then you can run mame and interface all the car games.

3) Use a N64 the motherboard is small and you can rewire the cart to be in the back. Then you can use a Ultra racer controller to interface with the tommy turbo http://www.nesrepairshop.com/online_shopping/index.php?productID=558

Crusin the world on n64 is great fun

4) Use one of those plug and play racing games like VR502 Carl Edwards Racing but of course that is one game and it's nes quality.

Don't forget that there isn't many mame games that use the Hi-Low shifter there are a few but for a small system like this a laptop unless it's free or really cheap might now be the best option for a desktop racing game.

You are quite lucky to find a tommy turbo so cheap i've been looking for a while and haven't been able to find one that wasn't $70 or so

There are bound to be more options than i've listed but these are the ones I know that will work with a steering wheel input and one's like the gp2x or dingo I am unsure if you can use a steering wheel with I would assume the actual emulator would need to be modified to use an external controller

[djlins]

Hi Nin, thanks for that,

I am being very finnicky and particular about this.

I originally wanted it to be a laptops guts so that it could be charged up and run from the 11V battery and then need no power cables hooked up. That way when you look at it you may really believe that it is the original (battery operated) toy, until it is turned on and you see the MAME menu booting up.
Unfortunately the laptop motherboards are just not going to fit so I have resided to the fact that I will need a Nano ITX board running off the mains, but I would still like it to have as little as possible modified on the outside if I can help it so anyone looking at it would make the first comment:
     I used to have one of them
Where I can then step in and show them just how cool this one is.

Aaanyways, about the throttle and controls, yes I have pulled the thing apart and studied the original throttle stick and I would like to tie that up to an analogue throttle, so if I was to butcher something like an XBox controller then forward is like a right trigger and backwards is like the left trigger.

The actual throttle stick itself runs hollow up one side of it so I also want to drill into the left and right at the top and set up a couple of buttons so I have things like a turbo boost and handbrake there if I need it.

Other buttons may go onto the main dash behind the steering wheel but I dont want to change the look of it too much if I can help it.

But yeah,
I think Nano then.

Cheers.