Project Arcade by John St. Clair

Author:John St. Clair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

Connecting Wheels And Flight Yokes

I talked quite a bit in Chapter 5, “Arcade Controls for Power Gamers,” about connecting arcade steering wheels, pedals, flight yokes, and positional guns to your computer. Bear in mind that the one thing these all have in common is that they have potentiometers inside controlling their movement. Details on how to hack them to the computer should begin to fall into place now. I'll discuss wheels in the rest of this section, but the principles apply to the other controls as well.

Wiring a steering wheel is easy enough. Connect the center leg of the wheel's potentiometer to +5v on pin 1 of the gameport, and connect the left leg to pin 3(joystick 1, X axis). So far this isn't any different from connecting a joystick, except that instead of a joystick moving left and right you have a wheel turning left and right. It gets a bit trickier when it comes to the pedals.

Warning: It's getting technical again! You might want to brace yourself with a cup of coffee before you proceed. Ready? OK, here goes. In Chapter 5, I referred to the difference between a single-axis and dual-axis mechanism for steering wheel pedals. On a single-axis pedal system, the gas and brake use two potentiometers connected in series that appear to the computer as a single axis. On a dual-axis pedal system, the brake and gas use two separate potentiometers that appear to the computer as separate axes. Wiring for both types is shown in Figure 10.4. Note that any buttons, such as those for shifting up and shifting down, are wired the same as in Figure 10.3 and are not shown.

Figure 10.4 Wiring for a single-axis system (left) and a dual-axis system (right).

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