Hard Drivin' uses a 10-turn pot inline with the steering shaft and uses some kind of 'stop' that claims to be a '3 rotation stop' in the manual (see picture below). If anyone has experience with repairing or maintaining that machine I would like to talk. I would like to figure out a way to mimic that design.
My main question is: Does that steering wheel turn 1 1/2 turns each way or 3 turns each way? My current vehicle I drive only turns 1 1/2 turns each way so there doesn't seem to be a need for more than that.
It looks like the FFB motor has a long screw on the end that runs through the 'stop' mechanism all the way to the 10-turn pot. Is that screw plastic or steel?
It would be really cool if you could describe how the stop mechanism works. It just looks like a screw that ends up 'binding' or 'stops turning' when it hits the end of the threads, grabbing an 'arm' which then rotates slightly and presses into several of four rubber stops. Is that basically it?
I can't seem to edit my post but I discovered this schematic variation of Hard Drivin' turned 3 complete turns, lock to lock and used a pot directly behind the ffb motor. Other variations used optical sensors and belted ffb motor to steering shaft and also used a separate centering optical wheel sensor.
Hard Drivin was one of my favourite games on Amiga (Hard Drivin II) and DOS PC (Race Drivin). I also played the arcade machines (Hard Drivin and Race Drivin) a few times in my youth. In MAME I
This is the Hard Drivin hardware page by the original game programmer Jed Margolin, including interesting tech details. (The steering wheel motor is mains operated. He warns about the risk of deadly electric shock when messing with its circuitry.)
The Hard Drivin steering in MAME behaves a bit odd. Once the car started to drift for a while and left the road, it often keeps spinning on the grass like a carousel and becomes very hard to control for the rest of the game. I am not sure if this is a MAME or game bug, or if this was even intentional game design, simulating excessive tyre wear or other car damage affecting steering - possibly exaggerated as a penalty for bad players.
(I control it by mouse on a slightly underpowered laptop with 1.6GHz Core2Duo and Intel graphics. The game plays well but often at about 90% speed. Setting steering wheel sensitivity "6" works best.)
- car crash into invisible object
After on the "race track" the car crashes somewhere near the grey drawbridge, after the usual "instant replay" the car is dropped back onto the road (falling 1m out of the sky?) at a certain spot with the drawbridge in sight. But if I push the gas pedal (rolling about 1m in any direction) the car keeps crashing into an invisible barrier (windshield shatters), is dropped back on the very same spot and so on; crashing from there again and again until time runs out. I am not sure if this is a MAME bug or game bug or even nasty little prank played by a poorly simulated Slapstick chip.
notes:
Did you ever wonder what the "wheel" setting in MAME analogue controls menu means? According to the Jed Margolin site, this potentiometer likely senses the seat position to control force feedback intensity of the arcade steering wheel motor, because the designers concluded that a player who moves the seat to the front is physically small and thus likely a child or otherwise weaker than a big person who moves it to the back.
Race Drivin simulates more complex driving physics than Hard Drivin and so has a different DSP chip with floating point capability. That's why MAME needs more CPU power to emulate it. The programmer site mentions that the chip contains a funny little easteregg to identify if hardware pirates of a bootleg version really managed to copy it or replaced it with something else. That is to say, the firmware includes a crude SDR algorithm that after reset morses the Atari copyright message to a nearby AM radio.
Quote
If you ground pin 4 on the TMS320P15 (signal 'P2') and then reset the chip (turning the game off for a few seconds and then turning it on again will do the trick) the TMS320P15 will send the Atari Games copyright message in Morse code which can be received on a standard AM radio by holding it near the DSK Board. Tune around the AM band to get the best quality signal.
The Race Drivin hardware had serial networking capabilities to link multiple machines as side monitors for multi-screen view (which of course in MAME needs more CPU power). This website has hardware info and many photos about this feature.
Even more exciting is that there were professional drivin simulators based on it. In 1990th in the RGVAC newsgroups people claimed that Hard Drivin had begun its life as a drivin simulator before they made it into an actual arcade game. According to this website they also used it to train for other emergency vehicles. A 3-screen machine was used in research to test driving fitnes under medical conditions like diabetis.
Documented is the AMOS (A.G.C. Mobile Operations Simulator) by AGC Simulation Products, which permitted to link up to 8(?) Panorama-like 5-screen machines to a central workstation (PC with additional single-screen machine as monitor). The setup was known as the "Police Trainer" and apparently used for policemen to train car chases. The youtube video shows that the 3D object design (vehicles etc.) was done on an Apple Mac.
Atari Games Police Training Simulator
- rom dump of professional simulator?
Has anybody found eproms or software of those serious simulators or researched if there were hidden features in Hard Drivin or Race Drivin code to support such things? May the code e.g. load race tracks from an attached PC or (hence the name?) hard drive!?
Hard Drivin has some really bizarre glitches. I am not sure if these are MAME or game bugs. (I even expect the latter.)
When at the start you turn left 90°, you can drive on the drift training track (a round track around a column, missing in most home versions) which is a well known feature.
But do you remember the movie "Ready Player One"!? When at start of the race I instead make a full 180° U-turn, I can drive the whole track wrongways without getting stopped (AFAIK home versions showed the 10s timer like driving offroad), but here you can really dive deeply down the rabbit hole.
So the train is visible through the right of the orange bridge side and you can drive trough that orange wall to it. If you slowly approach the locomotive front until you touch it (happens with some other objects like building walls too), the car positions suddenly teleports back onto a nearby road segment. (This may have been an emergency measure to prevent getting stuck in props. Bumping objects slow enough to not destroy your car may do strange things.)
When you drive wrongways and take the road fork to the left, you enter the Stunt Track, which has some drawing bugs in the road pavement of bridges and such. Also the tail of the truck looks somewhat incomplete when you see it from the wrong side. If you drive over the terrain from Speed Track to Stunt Track or vice versa (which is likely recognized as cheating), the message "wrongways" does not disappear and so after a while you are put back on the road segment you came from.
- the timehole
When after the U-turn your car slowly drives down the talus at the right road side (a bit like a bicycle jamming its wheel in a tram rail?), it plummets down a timehole and keeps spinning and tumbling in the sky with graphics mess for about 30s(?) while gaining >30k points(!). This may be a cheat but is likely just a pug. The car finally will explode and is put back on the road.
- what lies behind the green door?
When you drive wrongways and take the road fork to the right (on Speed Track), you see the back of a red barn. When you slowly drive to it, suddenly a green door (or vending machine?, looks like having a black coin slot or such) with an encircled yellow number "33" magically appears in the wall. I tried to do various nonsense here, but nothing interesting happens. If you collide the barn here, the replay does not depict that door.
- sightseeing
Driving around for sightseeing is quite interesting for such an early (sort-of) open world 3D game. There are various little details like all those flowers on the road, the cow is mooing when collided, you can overroll yellow road signs (making a nice metallic clang) and there is a coarsely drawn small rubble wall hut somewhere nearby a gas station(?). When strongly crashing in opponent cars (particularly while flying over the drawbridge), you can sometimes see them bounce off deformed or have flames coming out of the hood. Lightly touching foreign cars makes a bump noise. Even the dashboard has many unused gauges and lamps those show activity and may stem from its AMOS driving simulator origins. A bit strange is that the train has no visible rails (but you still hear them when rolling over??); it generally is the object with most drawing glitches, so likely they were omitted to reduce polygon count. At the right road side nearby start is a small rock (milestone?), which looks flat when seen from the side and seems to be the only pixel graphics sprite in the entire game, so it was likely a leftover from early graphics engine experiments with textures. (It does not damage the car when driven over the rock. Loosing the exhaust muffler with matching sound would have been the deserved result.)
Does anybody know the meaning of "33" on the barn or what else can be done at the green door or vending machine?
What does any of this have to do with reproducing the Hard Drivin' steering wheel? If you want to blather on about Hard Drivin', make your own thread or something.
What does any of this have to do with reproducing the Hard Drivin' steering wheel? If you want to blather on about Hard Drivin', make your own thread or something.
Sorry if this was considered OT/spam. I thought this forum philosophy was "minimize the count of threads" (as I see here in many other long threads) by keeping everything related to the same hardware class or game within one thread to reduce clutter. My reply had started as a comment to strange steering behaviour (excessive car skidding in the game in MAME which might have been a potential bug - not the physical steering wheel) and then went a bit OT.
Is it possible to split this thread after the steering part?
![[Linked Image from 1funidea.com]](http://www.1funidea.com/MAME/Steering Wheel/Design/hard drivin.png)
