not if you do it right. I never cut any harness if I can avoid it... just buy the right connectors and crimp your own adapter harnesses.
- Thread starter Darksoft
- Start date
That completely shows my inexperience with this. Do you have time to walk me through what I would need to accomplish this? Or point me in the right direction? I've looked at ultimarc's site but can't see what would be needed to take, from what i'm assuming on my arcade racer are the 2 parallel ports that convert to usb via a nytric exterme usb io card and maybe that's the piece that is really throwing me off here.
With the exception of the J-PAC I really don't care for Ultimarc's product because they all use screw terminals instead of real connectors. That just makes for a significant lack of professionalism IMO. I've started using the KADE USB Encoder for arcade inputs... for a few reasons.
1. The PC can see it as a pair of Xbox 360 Controllers, a pair of PS3 controllers, a pair of Generic USB Game Pads or a Keyboard, this makes it much easier to map especially with PC games that don't like mapping to the keyboards or refuse to map two players to the same device.
2. it's very low cost
3. it's open source
and
4. you can get it with normal pin headers instead of screw terminals.
The one thing that sucks about the KADE encoder is that information about what to buy and how to set it up is extremely hard to find... maybe I'll put a guide together at some point.
this really doesn't matter though because the process is the same no matter what you use. the KADE Encoder, or your Ultimarc A-Pac or whatever will plug into the USB port in your PC.
Then you follow the wires from the pedals or the steering pot until you get to a connector take pictures of it from every angle then disconnect it. Then take pictures of the connector disconnected from every angle and set about searching online for a model number of that connector because you'll need to buy the matching housing and pins.
Once you've got that and a crimper and some wire you crimp the connector together and plug it in, then run the other end of your wires to the KADE Encoder/A-Pac/whatever, and do whatever you need to do to hook those wires into that device.
then you're done with the hardware and if you want to put it back to how i was originally you unplug that connector from your custom harness and plug it back into whatever it used to be connected to.
1. The PC can see it as a pair of Xbox 360 Controllers, a pair of PS3 controllers, a pair of Generic USB Game Pads or a Keyboard, this makes it much easier to map especially with PC games that don't like mapping to the keyboards or refuse to map two players to the same device.
2. it's very low cost
3. it's open source
and
4. you can get it with normal pin headers instead of screw terminals.
The one thing that sucks about the KADE encoder is that information about what to buy and how to set it up is extremely hard to find... maybe I'll put a guide together at some point.
this really doesn't matter though because the process is the same no matter what you use. the KADE Encoder, or your Ultimarc A-Pac or whatever will plug into the USB port in your PC.
Then you follow the wires from the pedals or the steering pot until you get to a connector take pictures of it from every angle then disconnect it. Then take pictures of the connector disconnected from every angle and set about searching online for a model number of that connector because you'll need to buy the matching housing and pins.
Once you've got that and a crimper and some wire you crimp the connector together and plug it in, then run the other end of your wires to the KADE Encoder/A-Pac/whatever, and do whatever you need to do to hook those wires into that device.
then you're done with the hardware and if you want to put it back to how i was originally you unplug that connector from your custom harness and plug it back into whatever it used to be connected to.
That is great information, thank you! I'm going to look at the KADE device today.
So i looked at the KADE device. It appears too, that it only has the screw in terminals? My question is, if i use the mini-pac from ultimarc, or something that you think may be better, would i just be able to then find the other function of that nytric usb IO card to take the parallel port to usb? Maybe i'm completely oversimplifying this because of my lack of understanding?
No. the KADE project is just open source firmware, there are dozens of hardware boards that will run it, some of the have screw terminals others have pin headers others just have solder through-holes so you can attach whatever you like.
The Nytric I/O card is a proprietary card used by Global VR in their arcade machines. KADE/A-PAC/Whatever CANNOT replace the functionality of that card because the games on the Global VR PC are (to my knowledge) ONLY compatible with that card for I/O functionality. You would need to hack the game to use a different I/O Device.
The suggestion of a KADE Encoder was for use with a new, separate, generic Windows PC for use with MAME or other PC applications in your Driving cabinet. Similarly you wont be using, nor should you use the Nytric I/O card in your new PC... without proper drivers it's completely useless to something like MAME or other PC apps, and depending on how it works even with the drivers it might not be usable anyway.
It's my understanding that the Nytric I/O isn't used for any of the analog inputs either... All of that should be routed through the Immersion PCB. I'd suspect the Nytric I/O is only used for things like the coin slots and outputs for flashing lights.
That would make sense then. I'll keep looking for boards that handle KADE and move that direction. Thanks for explaining this to me.
I just pulled up the wiring schematics from global vr (don't know why i didn't think of that earlier) it looks like the db37 & the db25 connectors that are used in that Nytric board are being used for e-brake button, shifter, brake, gas pedal and the things you mentioned and the db25 connector is being used for the arcade buttons. Am I reading that wrong? Page 77.
http://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/qr/needforspeedunderground/manual.pdf
Yup, looks like it's used for everything but the steering pot. Makes sense that they would do that since the Immersion board CAN handle those things, it's just really limited in it's number of inputs.
I did get a response from the ebay seller and he stated he might have some more boards in December. I tried using a u-hid device for these 2 connectors and didn't get anywhere with that device.
