My 2 Rush 2049 SE conversions to emulation racing machines (work log)

[purbeast]

I figured I would kind of make this thread more dedicated to the actual project instead of the other one where I was asking some questions about monitors.

So my goal is to convert my 2 Rush 2049 SE cabinets into PC cabinets with emulation all while using the arcade hardware and force feedback as well, so that I can play both classic and modern racing games, across multiple emulators. It's a lot more fun to play multiple racing games instead of just being stuck with the same game over and over.

The first thing I started doing was researching what monitors to get. Long story short, I went with the 25.5" ASUS 16:10 VW266H monitors, which are very hard to find since they haven't been made in 15 years. But I was lucky enough to eventually find 2 that are in great shape. And they fit basically perfectly in there.

After a lot of careful and precise measurements and cuts, I ended up mounting a 2x8 with L brackets and a TV wall mount plate to put the monitors on.



I ended up getting some 1/16" ABS plastic that I cut to put around the monitor to give it that arcade bezel look around the monitor. I used double sided carpet tape to stick it on.



Now for the blue bezel I wanted to give it the "CRT curved glass" look and I found a video on youtube and post on here that explained about screwing 8 pieces of wood into the bezel, and then screwing acrylic into that. I was not a fan of having to drill into my bezel so I tried using some super sticky double sided tape on the inside of the bezel for the wood, and that ended up working out perfectly so my bezel has no holes in it with screws holding them in.



After that, I put a 24"x18" acrylic piece on there and kind of pushed it a little bit, to get the natural curve of the bezel where the CRT was, and then just screwed it to the pieces of wood.

Here is the final product of the 2 cabs which I think turned out fantastic and nearly looks stock.

While I was hunting those monitors, I did put the PCs together. I ended up with the following hardware:

i7 9500
32gb RAM
GTX 1070

I got some open aired PC cases that I mounted everything to and here are those PCs.

Today I received the hardware that I placed an order for back in May, which was finished production in early August, all the way from France. This is what is going to allow me to connect my Rush 2049 specific hardware into it and interface with the PC. I also opted to get 2 SSD's from the same person that already has 100+ racing games configured for a linked setup, which is going to be the SSD's in each of the PCs. They have Windows 10 on them.

Here is the hardware that I received today, which includes the UFFB, PMW2HAPP, and the Rush 2049 add on board.



I also have a 24v PSU for each cabinet which is used to power the FFB I believe. I opted to get a quality Mean Well PSU instead of the cheapest one I could find.

I am hoping to get some time this week to mess around with this. My plan is to get the first one all setup which should mean it will be a breeze to get the 2nd one setup. The SSD's have instructions on exactly what I need to do so I may browse that this evening even if I don't have time to do some work.

I will keep this thread updated with the progress.

Lemme know if you have any questions.

 

[purbeast]

Oh one thing I want to mention is that I had to remove the light bulb behind the right side of the bezel. With it in there, there was a lot of light bleed from the right side onto the screen. I was contemplating building some kind of little "wall" to block it but opted not to, cause it's not really necessary or anything.

 

[purbeast]

I started messing around with this tonight and took the cage out.

I am however having problems knowing what connects to that Rush 2049 specific add on board.

It has 4 connectors on it and the JAMMA connector. Obviously JAMMA harness goes on JAMMA. However I am not positive what goes on the other stuff.

One is 15 pin, one is 11, and 2 are 10 pin. All of them have some kind of J# label on them except the 15 pin one.

I was looking at the manual for the game and noticed that the Sound/IO board has a 15 pin connector attached which is the steering and pedals - I am guessing that is what that's for.

But the other ones I am not sure about at this point. A lot of the other controls are actually on the JAMMA harness according to the manual, like the view buttons/lights, gearbox shifter, and some other stuff.

I reached out to the creator to see if I can get more information but until I hear something else I probably won't mess with that part of it yet.

 

[purbeast]

I've been having a back/forth with one of the guys who is involved with this and he told me which stuff to connect to the add on board for an initial check. It was just the JAMMA harness and the 15 pin one, which has the steering and pedals on it. He told me after doing that to turn on the PC and open the one application and verify that the steering and pedals and view buttons work. Oddly enough, the JAMMA harness has A LOT of functionality in it for this game and that is where all the view and gear buttons and stuff are passed through.

So after doing that, I am getting nothing in the application. It says that it can't connect to the IO board. I am wondering if it could possibly be my micro USB cable because I only have 2 at home, but I believe they BOTH came with like a speaker or something that it was used strictly for charging. And I believe some of those USB cables used for charging ONLY have the power/ground wires connected, not the data stuff.

So I took a video and pics to send to him to see what he says. The thing that stinks is he's in France so the time difference makes communication take a lot longer.

I also have some trouble getting the SSD to be recognized. I had to turn on legacy boot in my ASUS bios and after that, the Windows booted into French lol so I had to figure out how to install English while looking at French, but google helped with that.

Once I did all that I got into the application only to see it not recognizing it.

So I'll see what he says. Here is a pic of how I have it mounted thus far with the non finalized wiring, and the screen with the error.

EDIT:

I just ordered 2 micro USB cables from Microcenter for in store pickup, so I'll grab them tomorrow morning and give it a try.

 

[purbeast]

Well turns out it was the cable, it's now responding to the application.

You can see the wheel turns fine and all 135 degrees both way, then I press the view and music buttons and you can see the checkbox show up when pressing, and then I do the gear shifters and you can see it too.

The reverse button on the gear shifter doesn't work though - not sure if that is on one of the other connectors but assuming so. I also didn't see the pedals respond but I don't think they would show up in that application. And the phone keypad buttons also don't show up but I'm not sure in general if those are going to ever work.

It was pretty dang cool seeing it respond in Windows though.

 

[Bobwiley]

Super exciting! I was hoping the keypad would work for keeping scores and such; lthough theoretically you could do it with the steering wheel in Rush 2049.

It'll be interesting what features are available for each game. I suppose linking and force feedback are the big ones, but keeping player profiles even if you switch games would be really nice.

Glad you first couple hurdles were relatively easy to solve. You'll be burning rubber in no time! Thanks for the detailed updates!

 

[purbeast]

Hooked up the 24v PSU to the motor now and got the FFB working, which is pretty damn cool to see working on a PC. I found a test app in the git repo for the main software that lets you test it out and took a video below.

I tried playing Hyperspin but inside of there my wheel and stuff isn't working and I'm not sure why. I can use the keyboard but not sure why the wheel and pedals and buttons aren't working in there. I'm guessing it's something pretty simple. I may have to go into HyperHQ to figure it out.

I also realized I have no sound, which thinking about it makes sense since I don't have any sound amp going and no sound hooked up to the PC. So I'm waiting to hear about how to config that.

But I'm getting there!

 

[purbeast]

This is not going nearly as smoothly as I was thinking or led to believe it would.

I'm having a lot of trouble with the FFB working properly. I got it working basically perfect in Daytona 2, but in Virtua Racing it's not working right. It like jerks the wheel to the left as soon as I turn rigth past center, and there is no spring/damper effect, so you have no tension turning the wheel. I am lead to believe it's just a setting though cause even in calibration stuff when I change to VR, even when not in the game, it acts this way.

Then on top of that, the lamps aren't quite working properly yet.

Oh and the sound isn't working yet either. I need to get an amp to wire in line to the speakers, but I don't know how I am going to get the speakers in the seat and the woofer in there working as well.

But hey that is where the fun is at!

I did have the sound working earlier randomly coming from the monitor I believe, which was cool to play VR and Daytona 2 with the sound and stuff, but I need to work through these issues.

My son also loved playing Cars even though it had no sound.

 

[Bobwiley]

Try getting a cheap used receiver. It'll fit under the seat probably, irregardless in cabinet. Worse case scenario on top. Problem will be the channels. You can do stereo and then have the amp run a surround sound decoder on it. Then just pick the best one and choose which signal goes to which speaker.

On a side note, on my Rush 2049 I want the seat speaker to be louder. So I plan on getting L-pads which will let you turn down the volume on the speaker without damaging the built in amp. That way people can really feel the road and vibrations but I won't need it arcade style loud in my own home. If you do a receiver, most will let you adjust the volume for each channel. For about 20 bucks you can also get a bass amp, where you would plug a rca/headphone jack in and it will separate out the bass sounds and power the back seat speaker.

I know you are still setting it up, but just curious, after doing Daytona, Virtual Racing and Cars. If you can't get Virtual Racing FFB working, does that bug you at all? Just curious on what games you're prioritizing to call call it a win or "good enough" in your book.

I also saw there was a Wacky Races game made a few years ago. Looney Tunes Space Race was a favorite on Dreamcast for whatever reason. It'll be interesting to see what games are possible on your set up.

Hang in there, you should be proud, you did a lot of leg work and prep work to get ya' this far! However, I gotta say, everyone knows the key to fixing arcades is knowing how to read a schematic AND how to speak French...

 

[purbeast]

Try getting a cheap used receiver. It'll fit under the seat probably, irregardless in cabinet. Worse case scenario on top. Problem will be the channels. You can do stereo and then have the amp run a surround sound decoder on it. Then just pick the best one and choose which signal goes to which speaker.

On a side note, on my Rush 2049 I want the seat speaker to be louder. So I plan on getting L-pads which will let you turn down the volume on the speaker without damaging the built in amp. That way people can really feel the road and vibrations but I won't need it arcade style loud in my own home. If you do a receiver, most will let you adjust the volume for each channel. For about 20 bucks you can also get a bass amp, where you would plug a rca/headphone jack in and it will separate out the bass sounds and power the back seat speaker.

I know you are still setting it up, but just curious, after doing Daytona, Virtual Racing and Cars. If you can't get Virtual Racing FFB working, does that bug you at all? Just curious on what games you're prioritizing to call call it a win or "good enough" in your book.

I also saw there was a Wacky Races game made a few years ago. Looney Tunes Space Race was a favorite on Dreamcast for whatever reason. It'll be interesting to see what games are possible on your set up.

Hang in there, you should be proud, you did a lot of leg work and prep work to get ya' this far! However, I gotta say, everyone knows the key to fixing arcades is knowing how to read a schematic AND how to speak French...

So the VR issue is definitely some kind of software bug, at least I believe so.

Even when I am in the back force feeder software (which is where you set everything up), when I change it to VR, at that point it does the weird pulling to the left. Like not even in the context of any game it does that, so I need to figure out why.

As for when it's a "win" that's a good question lol. I'm going to mess with some of the other MAME games later on and see if I get that same behavior or what. I don't plan on getting my 2nd machine up until I can get the FBB in a good general state and all of the sound and lamps working. Actually once I get the sound and lights working, I may do the 2nd machine because at that point I will at least have all the hardware setup correctly and I can put my machines back in their normal state.

 

[DarrenA]

Any chance getting a link to the Image so we can try out your SSD setup? I have a empty sitdown I might want to attempt this with.....

 

[purbeast]

Any chance getting a link to the Image so we can try out your SSD setup? I have a empty sitdown I might want to attempt this with.....

I don't have an image of it, the guy who sold me the hardware also got 2 SSD's ready for me and they came with the package.

 

[purbeast]

So I am running into some issues with the lamps. The lamps need 12v to power them.

If I plug the 4 pin power molex connector from the PC into the UFFB, the PC won't boot up at all like it's in some sort of electrical fail safe cause something is not right.

Then I found out that the USB going from UFFB to PC powers the UFFB, and he thought that the molex connector was also giving it 5v and that could cause this issue.

I then pulled the 5v pin out of the molex connector, and without the lamp connectors connected, the PC now boots up.

HOWEVER... when I plug in both lamp connectors, it gives me the same behavior where it won't boot up.

BUT... if I plug 1 in at a time, the PC boots up fine. BUT I don't get the lamp behavior I would expect.

1 of the connectors has the music lamp on it. The other one has view1, view2, view3, and the abort lamp on it.

When I plug the first one in, the music lamp does not light up.

When I plug in the other one, the view1, view2, and view3 all light up and they blink brighter as the output hits them, as expected.

I let the creator know and see if he has any idea what's up but this is some sort of electrical issue causing this I'm guessing. I just have no clue how to fix it.

 

[purbeast]

So this whole lamps thing really was a pain in the ass, but I figured it all out...

I ended up trying to hook up the UFFB to my desktop upstairs, and it powered right on with BOTH the USB plugged in and the molex connector. I also noticed that when I had it plugged in and the PC powered off, that the UFFB didn't have any lights on and was powered. And I had noticed with the PCs in my Rush cabs that when the PC is powered off, the UFFB had power to it still via USB. So that told me that my motherboard was putting out power over USB even when powered off, and it kinda made sense I guess cause that motherboard had LED lights on it and stuff when powered off.

So I went into the BIOS and found some settings to turn all the lights off and also turn power off on USB when in standby.

But it still didn't power on with USB and molex plugged in...

So I then tried to see what happens if I pull all the light bulbs and turn it on with the lamp harnesses connected.

And it powered on just fine.

Then I started plugging in lights one at a time. One of the lamp connectors has JUST the music bulb on it. When I plugged it in, I got the light to turn on. Then I plugged it into the abort light, and they both turned on. Then I put one in the view 1 one, and it powered on like after failing to "try" to start like once or twice. After I put 4 and 5 bulbs in, it would power on after "trying" and failing a few times, like i'd see the fan spin up on the PSU then stop, then spin then stop, etc, and finally came on. But the 4th and 5th bulbs weren't lighting up.

I relayed this info to the creator and he asked me if they were LED bulbs and I said no, and sent him a link to the bulbs I had. When I saw them, I realized they were 14v bulbs and he said to try out LED lights cause they use a lot less power.

I ended up ordering some LED lights on amazon, and bam, all 5 lights working perfectly now.

So I think what was happening is that it just didn't have enough juice to power all of those bulbs and was just not firing up the PC. I also noticed when the lights DID work, even when the bulb output wasn't on and firing the bright light, they were still on but dim. That doesn't happen with the LEDs and it wasn't supposed to be happening.

I now have working lamps though!

I then started working with the sound and that is also where things got a little interesting, which I'll update a bit later once I have it all worked out...

 

[purbeast]

Okay so now the sound update...

There is one connector on the Rush Add on board for the sound to connect and it's the final one that I had nothing connected to. If you look at the schematics of the game, on the Triamp PCB, there is an 10 pin connector with the woofer, rear left, and rear right - that is what the connector is for.

However the connector is a larger JST one, not the smaller one like the rest of connectors/plugs are that I've used so far.

So here comes the first hiccup.

I had to pull the larger JST plug and I have some connectors around from just spare extra parts I've ordered along with pins, so I just created my own connector for this one. I didn't have a 10 pin one but I have a few 8 pin ones so I just used that since it's 6 pins in a row.

After doing that, I realized that there are only 3 RCA plugs on the add on board, but there are 5 speakers in Rush.

I then used my multimeter to check continuity from the L/R speaker connectors on the JAMMA harness to see if they were the same as the rear L/R connectors on the 10 pin connector for the woofer, rear L/R connectors, and they ended up being the same. They also both connected to the same RCA ports on the add on board.

This lead me to test out continuity on the original hardware, and it turns out they are NOT the same. The original game actually has 5 separate speaker channels.

So this is hiccup 2.

I ended up pulling the pins from the JAMMA harness for the speakers, and since I didn't want to cut the pins off, I just stripped some wire, ran it through the pin and wrapped it around it, and used heat shrink around it to make a solid connection.

I then created a 4 pin plug that I ran those 4 wires to, to the UFFB where it had 2 RCA plugs for the front speakers (but if you are using other hardware - not JAMMA which requires the specific addons), and then ran 2 RCA plugs to the amp from there. In hindsight, and I am probably changing this, I could just go from the JAMMA harness to the amp instead of adding more wire run and that connector.

Oh speaking of amps - this is what I purchased 2 of - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCN8472L?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1

I needed 2 of them because I have 5 speakers. I believe I could have purchased a larger 5.1 one as well but opted for that since it's more DIY and cheaper.

I ran the 2 fronts and the woofer to one amp, and plugged that into the green audio port on my PC.

I ran the 2 rears to the other amp and plugged that into the black port on my PC.

I had just enough ports on my 24v PSU that I wired both amps to it for power.

I had to go into the windows settings to tell it I am running 5.1 but do not have a center speaker, and after doing that, the sound works in all speakers.

I still need to tweak the speaker volume so that it's perfectly set and I can just control it in the Windows slider, and I have to try to adjust stuff to get rid of some noise I'm getting, but overall it's working just fine.

So I was ready to finally close it up now that I have everything working fine and the rest is software, but then I realize that I ran into another issue when I went to test it...

Now my FFB is no longer working, so a fun update about that coming shortly...

 

[Pondscum]

What is the amperage rating on the 24v ps? You may not have enough current to start the motor with the amps on.

 

[mopar5150]

Where did you get the open air PC cases from?

 

[purbeast]

What is the amperage rating on the 24v ps? You may not have enough current to start the motor with the amps on.

Motor needs 10a according to the devs and the PSU I got is 14a.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B013ETVO12

I also already know what the problem is and will explain in a longer more detailed post shortly.

 

[purbeast]

Where did you get the open air PC cases from?

This is the one I got 2 of.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CT3SFYY9

It was the only one I saw that was designed to stand upright, There were quite a few others that were cheaper too, but they were designed to be laid horizontally.

 

[purbeast]

Okay so now for the FFB not working after I hooked all this back up...

I wasn't getting any feedback at all in the games that were working prior. Like none. I could tell the motor was getting power though because just with the motor "engaged" and powered, you can feel a SLIGHT tension on the wheel at any point when turning. It's the same with a real Rush 2049 setup. If you turn the wheel when it has no power, you can just tell it moves easier. But as soon as you turn it on, in menus or anything, you can feel it is a tad bit tougher to turn - that was all still happening.

There is also this utility called fedit.exe that is completely outside the confines of any games, that lets you just test the different types of FFB outputs, and even with that, I was getting absolutely no movement at all, and all of this was working fine before I started messing with the lamps and sound.

I contacted the creator of the boards and he said it is most likely that the motor driver board went bad, because they are just known to have quality issues and there is just no known reliable supplier of them. He said 1 in 10 of them go bad after a few hours of use. So I was like well that's just F'ing great. He said to try and replace it and it should work and he thinks that is the problem. It's a little driver PCB that goes on top of the PMW2HAPP and is what you plug the motor power and inputs into. All of the lights blinking on the PM2HAPP component he said were indicating that the PMW2HAPP is communicating with the UFFB via USB so that part should be fine, and that unfortunately they don't have any LEDs to indicate if the motor driver board is working, yet at least.

Since I have 2 of these whole setups I decided to just swap them and the FFB is working perfectly fine with the other setup.

So it does sound like that motor driver went bad. He said I could swap JUST the PMW2HAPP portion to confirm that is the case, however I don't feel like doing that since it's working fine now, and either way I'll have to replace the part.

Well thankfully the part is really cheap. You can get a single one for $10 or like 3-4 for $20. It's this part here called a BTS7960.

Amazon.com: WWZMDiB BTS7960 DC Motor Driver Compatible with 43A High Current Dual H-Bridge Motor Controller Board Module for Arduino : Electronics

Amazon.com: WWZMDiB BTS7960 DC Motor Driver Compatible with 43A High Current Dual H-Bridge Motor Controller Board Module for Arduino : Electronics

www.amazon.com

I plan on ordering some of these and just replacing it. It will just require desoldreing and resoldering 2 big points, the positive and ground wires.

I also did google this part after talking with him and yes, there is a lot of discussion about the reliability of that part with many people saying it's basically the roll of the dice if you get a good one.

I am however STILL having some weird FFB feedback with very specific games. Like Daytona 2 works fine, but Virtua Racing still does this weird thing where if I turn just past center to the right, it kicks back to the left. And I've seen it on other games.

I talked to the creator about this as well and he said that he believes I can solve this by messing with some FFB settings in the back force feeder software. He saw this same issue and he said adjusting the spring deadzone fixed this issue for his buddies machine.

He also specifically said that Daytona 2 has the FFB managed by the game itself due to the emulator it's using, whereas Virtua Racing (and other games) aren't doing it at the level of the game and rather using Windows to manage the pre-calculated FFB stuff, so that is why some games work better than others and you just have to tweak games on a game by game basis sometimes. I am pretty sure Virtua Racing is using MAME and the other issues I've seen I believe were also using MAME (but not positive about that) so I'm hoping when I have time to play around with it, that it solves the problem.

I will report back!