Posted by JP4 on 27, 2000 at 4:34 AM:
In Reply to: I looked over your page earlier... posted by CaVol on 26, 2000 at 8:36 AM:
Hey CaVol.
Thanks for the kind words! It's nice to know that not everyone thinks that I’ve lost my mind!
Back to the steering wheel - there is an idea that I've toyed around with for a while: I've thought about building a "steering wheel mount" of sorts. I've though about mounting a steering wheel into a piece of wood that would "overlay" my regular control panel. It would be the width of my regular control panel, and would mount using some kind of locking clamp on the sides of my cabinet that extend up just past the two sides of the control panel. So in essence, the steering wheel mount would be the only thing that I would have to "swap" if I wanted to use it. It's always a thought… I like the way my control panel is right now, so I'd hate to tear it up just to add the steering wheel.
I personally don't have any experience with any of Happ's USB interfaces, but I think that I've heard that they work pretty well. Anyone else here have any comments on it? Remember though that if you go USB, you'll want to stay in a Windows environment. I have the LP24, and it does everything that I want it to. I have all of my sticks and buttons hooked into it, and they work great. The only things that aren't hooked into it are the trackball and spinner.
The people here that have bought the KE72 really seem to love it. It seems to be that the biggest upshot of it is that you can hook an arcade spinner and trackball directly into it (and the 72 direct inputs don't hurt either!). But read that carefully: it's built to hook an *arcade* trackball/spinner into it. If you do what I did and use a plain old PC trackball, it would get plugged into your PS/2 or serial port on the PC, so the KE72 would not help you in that regard. My spinner uses regular "mouse" guts, so again, it gets plugged right into the PC. No "interfacing" or "encoder" is necessary.
I was always that the steering wheel and any pedals that come with it get plugged right into your joystick port. Again, I don't own a steering wheel, so I'm kind of guessing on that one. I'd recommend to just check out some of the steering wheels available at your local PC store and see how they hook up. I'm pretty sure that you can also get steering wheel assemblies that hook up via USB, so if your PC has USB, you'd be set in that regard too.
The quick-connectors that I used aren't *necessary* really. You could just wind or solder your wires right onto the prongs that are on the microswitches on the buttons and joysticks, but the quick-disconnects are just a nice way to have the wiring be secure on the prongs (more secure that just winding the wiring around the prongs), without making it absolutely permanent (which soldering them would do). I'm linking a picture here of the quick-disconnects that I used. The .187 quick-disconnects are the perfect size to clip right onto the microswitch prongs.
You pose a conundrum that I've tossed around for a while! I also would like a 4-way stick (probably a Wico ball-topped leaf joystick) as well as a trigger joystick for games like Tron, Satan's Hallow, etc., but I fear that my control panel would just get too crowded at that point. It's like I said earlier: you kind of have to figure out what's the most important to you. There really isn't an easy way to quickly swap just the joysticks out. Of course, swappable control panels would solve that problem...if that's the route that you want to go. Again, it's all a matter of taste.
Good luck, and let myself or any of us know if I/we can be of any help!
-JP4