I did stuff yesterday and paid the price today

I went and picked up a copy of GT5 from my local Gamestop. When the steering wheel arrives I’ll be able to do stuff and get my car-driving reflexes back. Also I’ll be able to have some fun with my game system that came with a bunch of games my son like but I don’t. I’m not a fan of first person shooters, and that’s most of the games in the bag. Also not a fan of sidescrolling fighting games like Mortal Combat. But they at least let me get the system up and running and tested to make sure it works.

In other news, my Joyce Smile mask was supposed to be out for delivery last night and never showed up, but the package tracker says it’s still out for delivery so it’s not like they brought it and I wasn’t there to accept it. This annoys me, but on the bright side I found a massage place that I can get to without having to change to another bus. It is slightly more expensive than my regular place, but I can get there in a few minutes from the house so that’s exchanging money for convenience. And the heat index was above 100° while I was out walking around in the sun so I got a bit dehydrated. Not terribly so, but enough to see in my urine which was a bright yellow this morning instead of the normal almost clear in the morning and completely clear the rest of the day.

On the Sprint-T I might have an alternate mounting for the steering box in relation to the radiator. It’s looking like I’ll have room for the box entirely in front of the radiator so from the front it will be axle, tie rod top drag link bottom, steering box, radiator, engine, body. The steering shaft will have to sneak around the radiator a bit, so I think I’ll install a support heim to keep things from flopping around between the steering box U-joint and the steering shaft U-joint or to the home made steering quickener, or the bought steering quickener U-joint.

Another possibility is welding the kit pitman arm and the one I already bought to extend it and basically get double the throw at the same amount of turn input which makes a steering quickener redundant, then mounting the box behind the radiator, so axle, tie rod top drag link bottom, radiator, and steering box, all inside the sides of the nose. This makes things really tidy from the outside, both aerodynamically and visually, and the box could sit in the area behind the electric fan shroud so it doesn’t block the air through the radiator and the extended pitman arm puts the drag link in front of the radiator. This has the advantage of maximum wheel angle, because the internal stops in the box limit the rotation of the shaft holding the pitman arm to just 90° but the extended arm can swing the front wheels much further than that. Basically what would be the next limit would be the tie rod hitting the axle brackets. If I make the extended pitman arm I might not need to use any quickener or maybe a much less aggressive quickener than the 5:1 I was planning on making which changes the 20:1 ratio 5 turn lock-to-lock Vega box only one turn lock to lock. I’ll have to do a calculation to see how much quicker the extended pitman arm makes the steering to see if I need to get a steering quickener or how much if I need to get or make one.

In other news I made a seriously twisty track in GT5 and when I tried to drive it one of the test vehicles was Jeff Gordon’s 2010 Cup car. I can barely keep a street car on that course without a steering wheel controller, there is no way I can finish a lap driving a Cup car. The track is a short and twisty kart track and way too narrow for a Cup car. It was hilarious trying to drive the car with the game controller.

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Recovering from my Turkey Coma on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well yesterday we went to my daughter’s house for round 2 of Thanksgiving dinner. This time the turkey was smoked instead of oven-baked. [old joke]Smoking a turkey is really difficult, do you know how hard it is to keep one lit?[/old joke]. We also had Loaded Baked Potato mashed potatoes, country-style green beans, stuffing, and they threw in a quart of gravy from the turkey vendor. So we had a pretty decent dinner.

I have been really enjoying my HD TV since I found the Velocity channel. Near as I can tell from the last three days this is an all-car-build channel. There have been several marathons for different build series like the one currently playing of Overhauling which is a program where they find some pretense to haul away a person’s car and completely restore it or complete an unfinished project. I also watched a Bitchin’ Rides marathon where they make show-quality cars…

Watching these car-build programs gets me fired up to work on the Sprint T. I have been considering possible donor vehicles for the drivetrain. Someone brought up Toyota full-size pickup trucks with the 5.0 and 5.7 DOHC V8 engines and automatic transmissions. The engines are a bit on the wide side and will probably hang out from underneath the sides of the hood, but the focus of a T-bucket is the engine. Most of the other potential donor vehicles are also V8 pickup trucks, or V8 luxury cars. One that also sounds interesting is the Hyundai Genesis sedan with the 5.0 liter V8 and 8-speed automatic and possible 4WD from the factory… And don’t forget Corvette, Camaro, Challenger, Charger, and Mustang late-model performance cars. And in addition to those are the plethora of crate engines and transmissions available. Decisions, decisions. I’m looking for something on the order of 600RWHP/ton with a weight around 1600 pounds wet. Obviously I’ll take lighter if I can get it, and more horsepower, but I don’t want to give up low-end torque for racing. Basically this is going to be a huge go-kart that will never get out of low gear on most autocross/Solo racing courses with instant throttle response, brakes that never give up, and tons of grip into, through and out of the corners.

I haven’t given up on building a computer model to run in GT4, but I have hit a brick wall on the formatting for the car file. Nobody that is willing to tell me knows, and nobody that knows is willing to tell me how. All I need is the file format and the variables, I can do the car performance programming myself, and I have someone who can build the graphic model. I really want to drive the Sprint T at the Nürburgring, but there ain’t no way I will be able to ship the car there to do it IRL, so it will have to be simulated on the PlayStation. And I have several variations of the car I want to program in, the full street version with the soft springs and shocks and the skinny hard compound tires, the Goodguys version with the high performance street tires and tuned springs and shocks, and the SCCA Solo version with the 14″ wide wheels and the soft, wide slicks and the tuned springs and shocks. The SCCA version also runs tires that drop the car by 2″ in ride height without changing the suspension settings, so the CG also drops by 2″ and has to be entered into the performance programming.

Getting back to that new TV, you would not believe the difference in enjoyment going from the dinky SD TV to the 32″ HD TV I bought Wednesday… which I think I might have mentioned a time or two already. I mean it ain’t as cool as a good bike ride, but watching TV without bands of purple and orange going up the screen is pretty cool. I don’t know what was dying in the old TV, but it was worse running through the tuner than it was going through the composite in with the audio jacks. We had a couple of days without AC a few years back that took the stuffings out of the old TV.

We are having our annual post-Thanksgiving potluck at church this evening and I have to shower and get ready, so this looks like a great place to stop, proofread, and edit the post before hitting “publish”.

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet

I need some technical information for GT4

This post has nothing to do with bicycles in any way shape or form, I’m asking about hacking a video game that I have purchased a legal copy for and may modify for my own uses per fair use.

Here’s what I think I know:

I own a PS2. I’m pretty sure the box with the PlayStation logo on it that I got from my son a few years ago is a PS2.

I own a legal copy of GT4. The box has the “Classic” GT4 cover and a PS2 Greatest Hits logo across the top and I purchased the game through Amazon, so I’m pretty sure it is a legal copy.

GT4 allows installing cars via the lan function. I have read that you can “buy” cars online for GT4.

Put those together and it seems I can fool the game into believing I won or bought my Sprint T online.

What I need to know is where I need to put the file for the car, and what I need to do to make the car. Obviously I can hack the performance part of an existing car and just use the cosmetic file for that car and get something that will drive like the Sprint T cheap and dirty. Then I need to find out how to make a 3D model of the car to get something on the screen that looks like the car and drives like the car. All the while tweaking the performance files to get as close as possible to the real car as it would drive in real life. The in-game car that is closest to the Sprint T in terms of performance is the 2000 ‘Vette but the Sprint T is about 1900-2000 pounds lighter and has a slightly higher rear weight percentage than the ‘Vette. The next closest is the Caterham in terms of weight and HP but the Sprint T has more power in the lower part of the RPM range and on the track has much bigger tires and brakes. The street version of the Sprint T actually has less tire footprint than the Caterham while keeping the same brakes as the race version (since all I planned for going from street to race was swapping tires and wheels and maybe springs and shocks).

And I came up with a really devious anti-theft hack for the real car: Make the steering wheel removable, and put a lot of the electrical controls on the wheel. Then require one line from the wheel be hot all the time or the car won’t start or keep running if it does start, and shorting the wrong wires from the 12V input to try to figure out which wire needs to be hot will blow the fuses to the other wires. What I see is using a 5V voltage regulator and a big resistor off that to the control switches with tiny (amperage) fuses between the controls and the inputs on the control box, except the one that needs to be 12V. That one goes to a latching AND gate that requires that input and the start function off the key switch to trigger and send current to the real ignition switch disguised as a control of an AM “radio” on the dash. The headlight switch would be the other control… with the various annunciator lights edge lighting the “dial”.

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet