Posted by Arcade2000 on 31, 2000 at 12:24 PM:
In Reply to: Wiring up my new 2 optical steering wheel control panel to a pc. posted by Agent Davis on 31, 2000 at 2:27 AM:
: How should I go about doing this? Should I do it with one serial mouse and wire up one wheel to each axis or use two serial mice? One seems to make more sense. Should I go with PS/2? I will also be having a panel with two trackballs and a spinner between them. How's this for a solution:
To be perfectly honest, that probably won't work too well. The optical sensors on the Wheel CP may clash with the ones on the mouse. What you can try is the Happ interface, or one of the many others designed to work with Original Arcade encoder technology.
: -The motherboard I will be purchasing will have two serial ports on it I'm sure.
: -To one serial port I can hook up one trackball.
: -To the other serial port I can hook up any of the following: 2nd trackball, spinner, or dual wheel panel via one serial mouse.
As long as you're not using one for a Modem then fine, otherwise you'll end up with only one port to work with.
What I did was I used the Y-mouse for the switching between the Spinners and trackball. Then I went from the PC to a manual Serial switch box I mounted in the front of the Cab in an aluminum Plate, plugged the y-mouse into the A port and unscrewed the B port and cut a serial port hole into the plate and screwed the B serial port connector in so It sticks out the front.
Switch to B, and I can plug in any optical controller I create, (BTW, in case the thing requres power, as most interfaces do, I wired from one of my PC's drive connectors +5/-5 to a 1/4 inch headphone plug female mounted aside the serial connector). It works well, since I use several external controllers wired for optical use.
Good luck, bet you can't wait for it to be done.
BTW, I took a cue from you and just bid on and won an original Atari Cabinet's Steering wheel with assembly, for $12.95!