Something happened to time and space

It must have, because last I checked my videogame controller was in the middle of the Pacific and not due until the end of August, but when I checked the mail guess what was on the porch?

Going through a time-space distortion must be rough because will you look at this?

So far the steering works, the gas works, the brakes seem to work, and it doesn’t shift when I move the shifter either direction, changing gears requires using the controller buttons which is no big thing. It might be because of the game settings needing to be changed from automatic transmission to manual.

Now I need to find someone who can program my car in whatever format GT5 requires so I can drive around the loose and flowing autocross courses I was able to create using GT5. The controller takes some getting used to, but I managed to get a full lap without hitting any walls in the 2011 NASCAR Chevy. Not at speed, but getting through the course without hitting anything with the game controller was not something I could do at any speed, so the new controller is a major improvement.

More when I have it.

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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.

I went out and paid bills again yesterday

And suffered mightily in the heat and humidity, heat index flopping around between 106° and 101° as a popup T-storm moved through. Mrs. the Poet suspects that I might need to buy shoes because I could barely walk because the soles of my feet hurt so much and it has been a while since I bought shoes. Anywho, my bill went down again as they are no longer charging a “convenience fee” for me to go to their store to pay my bill. My total payment was only $15 this month taxes included. So my bill has gone from $33/month to $15/month since April. Color me happy!😌

Also on the agenda I bought a steering wheel and pedals for my PS3 and laptop, should I find a driving game that will run on this laptop. But it will work for GT5 and GT6 on the PS3, so I should be pretty good. It’s a 180° rotation wheel with a shift lever and two pedals, meaning it’s perfect for simulating the Sprint-T except the steering is a little (by orders of magnitude) quicker than the Sprint-T. The real thing will have either 2.5 turns lock to lock with the store-bought steering quickener, or 1 turn lock to lock with the home-made quickener, which is either 3 binary or 1 binary order of magnitude quicker than the game controller, but the 270° controller was like three times as much as the 180° controller and nobody makes a 2.5 turn controller. I suppose I could install a reduction drive between the controller and another steering wheel (I have 3 from various project cars over the years that I put the OE steering wheels back on before I sold them), but TBH I don’t feel like it and it would be massive overkill for this project. Now I need to go to Gamestop and find either of the two games to buy. I have GT4 for my PS2 which is how I know that I need to get a wheel to use GT5 or GT6 on my PS3.

On the Sprint-T progress has been slowed because I’m either out doing stuff, physically recovering from being out doing stuff, or working on my computer like I’m doing right now. But I have a plan for when time and being able to do stuff coincide. I need to drill the pilot holes in the 2 by 4s so they don’t split when I drive the lag bolts in. I need to screw the sides of the nose to the radiator mockup between the two pieces I’m using to simulate the radiator end tanks on either side. And it looks like I’m going to need to cut a 6″ by 8″ hole for the steering box to hang out 5″ from, or figure out some way of denting the sides to allow the tires to turn at full steering lock. Easier is letting the steering box hang out the side, more trick and smoother appearing is forming a recess for the tires to still turn. Another factor is the side panels can be replaced with HDPE which is easily heat formed for such things as tire clearance. A third consideration is this nose was designed to make downforce and force air through the radiator, and the wider I make it the more of both it will make, and the center panel will allow for a 45″ wide nose if I don’t trim it, which will make it the same width as the body, or I can make it 39″ which will make it as wide as the windshield and have the side panels up underneath the nose to smooth the flow to the body somewhat.

Speaking of the steering box, the one I ordered will ship 2020-08-10 or sooner. The ‘Rona has messed up restocking stuff as it gets sold, so I’m waiting on a literal slow boat from China for my steering box. Everything else is Made in USA, but the big part is wending its way to some West Coast port, probably Long Beach or Portland if freight volume from China is anything to go by, or Portland if closest direct truck route to Nebraska is a factor. But I won’t get to see it for another month or so. Also on a (different) slow boat is the steering wheel controller that may be here by my birthday if I’m unlucky, the last delivery date is 9/21. The first one is beginning of August so they haven’t even picked the slow or the quick boat yet…

Looking at driving sims for my PS3

Whenever my son upgrades his gaming console I end up getting the old one to play with so I recently acquired a PS3 system to play with. Now about the only games I play any more are racing sims, and they have gotten to the point that it’s almost impossible to control them without a wheel and pedals, because the hand controllers lack the precision to keep the cars in the games on the track. This means off the bat I need to drop roughly $150 out of my car budget into buying something to play with that only tangentially benefits the Sprint-T by keeping my driving skills sharp-ish.

Now if I get the right game I might be able to build a Sim-T and download it to the game, but unless there are some kinds of tutorials out there I’m not familiar with, the “I” is not going to be “me”. I don’t have any training in the programming languages needed to create stuff for the PS3. My coding skills such as they were are stuck back in the last quarter of the 20th Century and basically anything related to video games is out of my league. I might be able to tune the ECM of my engine given the right software, but that doesn’t translate to doing the same for video games. Even if I had the right software to create the objects I lack the knowledge of how to create the object even with the software. So what this boils down to is unless I get incredibly lucky and there is a car with similar weight, power and dynamics the sim won’t do much for training muscle memory except in the most rudimentary ways, but it will be fun anyway. I have been told that I might be able to use my laptop to run a sim, Asetto Corsa that will let me import a modified version of a Caterham 7 that will be close to the power to weight and grip, but I don’t see how that will work given what I spent on this laptop, roughly $250 2 years ago. So the laptop has about 2GB of memory and an unknown video controller because I can’t get into the hardware from my Windows button. Settings is pretty much useless for discovering what hardware I have installed with this computer. So far everything I have tried has come up empty as far as figuring out what graphics processor came with my computer. Even looking up the computer on Google didn’t answer anything concerning the graphics processor.

I’m going to do some more research and if anything useful turns up I’ll let you know

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

Good news and bad news after visiting the Lab Rat Keeper, and the Feed

I mangle an old Internet meme, Wreck-free Wednesday morning

You have to go way back into the depths of Internet history to find this, but there used to be a big thing about a bad Engrish video game. The Game itself was not so bad, decent mechanics and replayability, but the cut scenes were so bad, because the dialog was badly translated subtitles, that people actually plugged quarters in it just to see the cut scenes. The game was Zero Wing…

Someone slipped us the car! Main screen turn on channel 4.

All of your roads are belonging to us!! Ha, ha, ha!

You have no chance to survive make your time. Your puny bicycles are no match for our motor vehicles.

We take to the roads for great justice!

If only real life was like video games, all bicycle riders would at least have something to shoot back with. We would probably still die in the same numbers we do now, but we could take a few cagers with us when we went.

PSA, Opus