Some of you guys may have been following my quest for a decent Dreamcast racing wheel in the
main racing wheels thread. In particular, I've been looking into how I can improve the official Sega/Agetec Race Controller - a couple of months ago Ben Ryves very kindly provided a copy of his de-deadzone mod for me to use, and I've been investigating additional functionality since then. Now I've finally finished this project and am excited to share the result:
This modified Race Controller now has the following features:
I always enjoy customising my projects to have a unique appearance, and thought this was a good change to refresh how the wheel looked. The new decorations are inspired by the Ketz wheel design found on Model 3 Sega arcade units - this was achieved by dying the buttons black with Rit Dyemore, spray painting the hub with Tamiya paints, and designing and applying a Sega waterslide decal logo.
Here you can see the remains of one of the other devices used to update this unit - the Performance TremorPak Plus. This was used to add not only vibration support, but also to include internal memory via the same slot, particularly for games which require a VMU to be inserted in slot 1. The TremorPak Plus case was chopped up to fit fully into the slot, and a Lego tile was trimmed to act as a fixed cover for the slot, though this can be pried out for maintenance.
Here's the base of the unit opened up to see the main electronics. You can see the de-deadzone PCB attached to the main board - this is very conveniently a plug-and-play solution. The larger red and black wires coming from the VMU slot are then the wires leading to the vibration motor in the wheel itself.
Here's the front of the wheel open to show the added vibration motor. I left plenty of slack on the wires to allow the face of the wheel to be removed for maintenance.
Closeup of the motor assembly itself. As mentioned before, this aspect of the project was inspired by brunocore2's vibration mod, but I didn't fancy gluing the motor directly to the wheel as he did, in the interests of keeping things modular in case it ever fails. Instead, I cut the motor bracket out of the TremorPak Plus and glued that to the wheel, and used a Lego piece to shield the motor weight from the rest of the wheel's internals. The kitchen roll was added to dampen the unit's rattling against other parts of the wheel, though this was a very haphazard solution and may need to be replaced with some proper padding in future!
Just as I made the outside pretty, I fancied giving the unit a custom memory icon too. Since the unit no longer has a VMU screen, I opted for a solid black look with the Sega logo seen on the wheel hub. The icon was created using the usual DC Linker/VMU Explorer method.
As much as I'm really happy with how the wheel's come out, there are a few things which I may need to monitor as I use it:
- When dying the buttons, I think I must have raised the heat a fraction too high, as the internal contact portions of them have warped ever so slightly. In particular, I've had to remove the springs from the A and B buttons so that they can still make proper contact with the switches inside the wheel. I might see how else I can improve this, or if I can get a broken wheel super cheap, maybe dye a new set at a lower temperature.
- The TremorPak Plus works as both a vibration pack and VMU simultaneously, which can cause problems in some games. I'm using the internal memory function as an added bonus for the time being rather than relying on it exclusively, but if this becomes more of an annoyance, I may replace the unit in the VMU slot with one of the switchable vibration pack/VMU units on the market.
Having said that, I'm generally really pleased with how this has come out - playing driving games with the wheel is excellent fun now, and the unit really looks the part too.
