Outrun w/ mame hooker force feedback

joearcade

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Hello,

I am looking for some help hacking my original outrun cabinet hardware to work with mame hooker. Currently I have an outrun cab in the basement that I would like to run mame on with a pc. I am really not to sure how to interface original hardware to the pc and would love some advice. Anyone done this? I am aware of sslakkerr's outrun and have contacted him via this site and youtube though am unsure of how active he is. Any direction would be of great help.

Thanks!

Joe
 
Please post your results. I have a feeling that someday most/all Out Run cabinets will have to be done this way, as boards die off.
 
I guess all you need to do is send a signal/pulse to the forcefeedback motor to shake the wheel, so maybe using something like the board that drives the lighted buttons? as that board tells a device to be on or off?? or is it harder than that? would be cool to have a driver MAME with FFB
 
Yeah np I will update my progress. I know its been done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZEzUkB_Olo

Would love to talk to this guy. Just don't know how to interface it. I know you can hack a force feedback wheel amp the signal up from the brd. I don't particularly want to go that route. Want the most direct connection, right now I have an A-pac laying around to interface the control, just not sure how to get the vib on.
 
I don't know anything about "mame hooker", but I do have an original OutRun, and I know how it works.

All the steering wheel shaker motor needs is a 5V signal to activate the SSR (solid-state relay) board. That, in turn, applies power (50V, IIRC) to the motor that shakes the steering wheel assembly.

So, if you have all of the original hardware except the PCB, all you need is a PC that can output a 5V signal when it wants to run the shaker motor. That (and the GND to which it is relative) would connect to the original SSR board, which would also need power from the original power supply in the bottom of the cabinet (one of the bridge rectifiers and filter caps).

OutRun also has a lighted start button, which doesn't have a relay, but is driven directly by the PCB. So you may need a transistor or relay or some way for the MAME PC to supply enough current to drive that (incandescent) lamp, which prolly needs several hundred mA.
 
Check out arcadecontrols.com forums. You can talk to the author of MAME Hooker there. there are also quite few threads about it already over there.
 
I don't know anything about "mame hooker", but I do have an original OutRun, and I know how it works.

All the steering wheel shaker motor needs is a 5V signal to activate the SSR (solid-state relay) board. That, in turn, applies power (50V, IIRC) to the motor that shakes the steering wheel assembly.

So, if you have all of the original hardware except the PCB, all you need is a PC that can output a 5V signal when it wants to run the shaker motor. That (and the GND to which it is relative) would connect to the original SSR board, which would also need power from the original power supply in the bottom of the cabinet (one of the bridge rectifiers and filter caps).

OutRun also has a lighted start button, which doesn't have a relay, but is driven directly by the PCB. So you may need a transistor or relay or some way for the MAME PC to supply enough current to drive that (incandescent) lamp, which prolly needs several hundred mA.
Ill keep that info in mind thanks!
 
Yeah np I will update my progress. I know its been done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZEzUkB_Olo

Would love to talk to this guy. Just don't know how to interface it. I know you can hack a force feedback wheel amp the signal up from the brd. I don't particularly want to go that route. Want the most direct connection, right now I have an A-pac laying around to interface the control, just not sure how to get the vib on.

He's a close friend of mine and member (sslakkerr) here. I'll try and get him to post some info here for you. I was supposed to mame my outrun cab as well, but that project has been on the back burner for me. From what I know, he's using a u-hid nano board for steering controls, soft15k for video, the sega amp in the cab for sound, and a parallel cable with mame hooker to output signal to shaker motor.
 
WOW awesome that is great news! Yeah I was planning on using an A-pac for the controls, sega amp for sound, replace the 19 inch crt with a 19 inch crt dell monitor (original has lots of burn in), PC with mame. I would be very interested in that parallel cable design as well mame hooker config and what mame software supports the control feedback. Thanks!
 
A 19" PC monitor is gonna be noticeably smaller than a 19" arcade monitor. 21" PC monitors are the closest size to the 19" ones (being just a teeny bit bigger). This size difference is due to the fact that CRT PC monitors are size inflated, including non-viewable area in the calculation, while arcade monitors don't do that, at least not in America. That is why when you used to buy a PC monitor it would say something like 17" (15.4" viewable) on the box.

WOW awesome that is great news! Yeah I was planning on using an A-pac for the controls, sega amp for sound, replace the 19 inch crt with a 19 inch crt dell monitor (original has lots of burn in), PC with mame. I would be very interested in that parallel cable design as well mame hooker config and what mame software supports the control feedback. Thanks!
 
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Outrun originally came with 20" monitors, but I've seen many get replaced with easier to find 19's by ops. Anything less will be slightly noticeable around the monitor shroud.
 
Dang I did not think about viewable size. Gunloc it looked ok? I mean 19inch crt monitors are extremely easy to find. Mine I paid 20 bucks for and even then I thought it was too much. Do you know if the different size was any problem mounting?
 
Hey Joearcade, nice to see someone else taking on this project!

I'm going to have to look through my system to get specifics, and I'm sick so my brain is not firing on all cylinders, but basically I compiled mame (v139 i think) with segaorun.c file from here (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=101789.0;topicseen), and configured mamehooker to activate a couple parallel port pins to trigger the start button and steering rumble motor. I believe the trigger voltage was 5 volts for each, but my par port outputs were too low so I used the par ports to trigger sending 5 v from the pc power supply.

I know Howard_casto was in the process of getting that segaorun.c added into the official mame release back when I was doing this so u may not need to compile it. I can send u the compiled mame if needed.

I'll check this thread so we can discuss here and have a resource for others.

Good Luck
 
sslakker,

Hold up I think im going to go a different route. I purchased an logitech force feedback wheel e-uc2 on ebay for 20 dollars. I'm going to hack it, the nice thing about this older force feedback wheel is i can use it with pots it's not an optical wheel which translates nicely to the outrun hardware. Also and this is the kick butt part. The motor driven by the ffb wheel is 42V nom 1.3 amp 5-80watt, the motor in the outrun is 45V nom 1.6 amp 50 watt. I'm planning a direct hook-up. It is a tiny bit under powered but I doubt I will notice the difference. The bad part though is im told there is a centering force on the wheel, like an idle. I am hoping that this is not noticeable. If it works then I can run "final burn ffb mame" which does infact support outrun force feedback.
Also I can run sega supermodel 2, also supported. There is a bunch I can do with it plus ps2 games on the outrun since the wheel is ps2/pc compatible.

http://nonmame.retrogames.com/

What do you think?
 
Sounds like a big project getting that wheel to fit into the cabinet, plus the outrun wheel is pretty heavy duty...i haven';t seen a ffb wheel that comes close to it. I'd be afraid that it may break given the cabinet's standup configuration, which lets someone easily put a lot of stress on the steering shaft. For the power, I'd use the usb wheel's power supply and be done with it. If that power feeds anything besides the motor, the different volts could cause problems. The pedals should be easy to wire in since it;s all pot driven.

It would be really cool to have a true ffb wheel in the cabinet. You could run pc racing games in there and have a pretty damn kick ass system. Ya got me thinking now...I do have another Outrun cabinet in the garage...

Good luck with the retrofit! If you go back to mamehooking it I'll help as I can.
 
sslakker,

Hold up I think im going to go a different route. I purchased an logitech force feedback wheel e-uc2 on ebay for 20 dollars. I'm going to hack it, the nice thing about this older force feedback wheel is i can use it with pots it's not an optical wheel which translates nicely to the outrun hardware. Also and this is the kick butt part. The motor driven by the ffb wheel is 42V nom 1.3 amp 5-80watt, the motor in the outrun is 45V nom 1.6 amp 50 watt. I'm planning a direct hook-up. It is a tiny bit under powered but I doubt I will notice the difference. The bad part though is im told there is a centering force on the wheel, like an idle. I am hoping that this is not noticeable. If it works then I can run "final burn ffb mame" which does infact support outrun force feedback.
Also I can run sega supermodel 2, also supported. There is a bunch I can do with it plus ps2 games on the outrun since the wheel is ps2/pc compatible.

What do you think?



I could be wrong, it's been a while and I'm getting old.. But,

The Outrun steering motor is a shaker motor isn't it? A simple on/off motor arrangement that shook the steering and the Logitech is a true force feedback setup designed to put resistance and feel into the turning motion of the wheel. Not really the same sort of systems..

I don't think hooking the logitech feedback driver to a shaker motor is going to work for several reasons.


D
 
Oh, if that's what he's planning than that isn't going to work right. Like D_Zoot said, Outrun has a rumble setup, where the entire steering unit is on a slider and the motor is connected via an arm to push and pull the steering unit from side to side. It has nothing to do with the rotation of the steering wheel.
 
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