Tf Computer Nerds (Gamers, Overclockers, Server-Ists Etc)

[forteh]

This might be a long one....

I've spent the last few nights fiddling with my rudder pedals, renovating them and converting to usb from the old gameport which no longer works in win7.

They're thrustmaster RCS, here's an advert for them from 21 years ago! Whilst old and the original pot is pretty shot and dirty the mechanism is still in relatively good nick, however when using them through a gameport-usb adaptor they effectively work at an 8 step resolution in each direction of the axis, this makes them very, very difficult to use as rudder pedals when fine control is required!

I replaced the original slider bearing pads underneath the foot plates years ago as the original crappy ABS blocks were less than worthless for the job (sticky and soft, which in turn scored them up and added loads of stiction). I cut some 1 3/4" nylon bar from work into half round pads and epoxied them in place which made the action a lot more fluid. This was back in the winxp days though so I had no need for further mods.

In order to convert them to usb I figured it would be cheapest and easiest to simply buy a usb joystick, junk the housing and canabalise the guts (pots, loom and motherboard) and install them somehow onto the RCS chassis. I bought a saitek av8r off ebay for a fiver, stripped it down and set about working out which axis pots I would use on the rudders, given that it's a 5axis joystick I figured I may as well take the extra step and add analogue toebrakes onto the RCS (the pedals pivot like an accelerator as well as sliding back and forth).

Got the pot mounted with the original RCS centre gear drive, used a single patress box mounted on the central beam to hold the motherboard, a little hot melt glue and jobs a good un! Plugged it in, installed drivers and away we go, usb rudder pedals

Unfortunately the 20+ year old plastic centre gears have so much slop and wear in them it wouldn't return to a reliable centre

Fabricated a cam link and used a ball jointed trackrod off one of my old RC racing buggies to give a direct mechanical linkage, somehow I managed to guess at the right cam length and it suited the pot travel really well! Put it all back together, plugged it in and now not recognised in windows! Pull the board and notice that the one of the soldered usb connections onto the board has come free; out comes the soldering iron, strip the wires back and reconnect them. Reassembly patress box, plug in and windows reports that the usb device has malfunctioned - bollocks! Not sure what I did but something blew on the motherboard and effectively undid all of the work so far in one fell swoop

Call it a night at that with the intention to scour ebay for more cheap usb joysticks. Wake up in the morning and have an epiphany that I have an old logitech forcefeedback usb wheel with pedals in the loft - I don't play driving games and its sacrifice will be for the greater good!

Retrieve the wheel, get it stripped to find that the logitech motherboard is twice the size of the saitek one, so the lovely installation of the patress box is now scrap However the wheel has much smaller, higher quality pots than the saitek stick and a much simpler wiring loom so in reality is a better donor!

Get the pot mounted with a new cam linkage cut out of the wheel spindle, a slight modification (bend in a vice) was required to the tie rod to get the right clearances but it's back to the same approximate range of movement as before. Got a 50x20x130 block of nylon to make into a motherboard tray, spent 45 minutes in the shed at 10pm last night routing it out to hold the board snugly, covered the shed in drifts of black nylon chips - going to be a nightmare to clean up. Got it all fitted to the chassis glued the board in and connected the usb lead with strain relief (hot melt glue and sticky ziptie pads), plugged it in to the wifes laptop and it works a treat - the axis all work as planned and gives a nice smooth range of movement.

Adding the toebrakes requires for either the whole footplate to pivot or an additional hinged flap to be fitted onto the top edge of the plate. Decide to go for the former as it is a more natural ankle movement and potentially a simpler, more robust solution. Removed the foot plates (after finding the correct imperial allen keys in a dark shed, thank your america!) and cut about 20mm off the top of the aluminium brackets, rounded the leading edge off and I now have foot plates that move perfectly from about 15° inclined to horizontal. I still have to fashion a pair of ball joint linkages and pot cams but that shouldn't be too much hassle

In practise the difference just by changing the centre pot to a usb controller has made a world of difference, I now have smooth high fidelity motion with far more control. For flying helicopter simulators it is unbelievable how much more control there is! The toe brake functionality will also be used in arma3 for analogue leaning/peaking around corners when on foot, that means I can unbind it from the head tracking system which will give more freedom of movement. Once I have the toebrakes enabled I will have no less than 17 analogue controller axis that can be bound to in arma3

Yes I could have gone and bought some usb rudder pedals for 80-90 quid, but they would be made of plastic, wouldn't last 20+ years and wouldn't be mine

TL : DR - I renovated an old obsolete gaming peripheral from the early '90s, modernised it and added functionality just because I can

Edited December 3, 2014 by forteh

[Muel]

Good work mate.

I bought me a Raspberry Pi, tis awesome fun!

[forteh]

Acquired alien isolation oh f**k that's a scary game

edit: yes it's dark, yes I'm playing it with headphones, yes I almost shit me self when the cat jumped on my lap!

Edited December 4, 2014 by forteh

[weirdoku]

I have Isolation too. FML.

[forteh]

But it's sooo perfect!

Dark, atmospheric, gritty, claustrophobic, filled with steam and loads of dancing light and shadow to really freak you out

edit: the fact it runs at 60 fps constant on ultra settings is nice as well.

Edited December 4, 2014 by forteh

[weirdoku]

I haven't played it much but I do like it.

Yeah, running it maxed but only 1080p monitor though.

[forteh]

Likewise, higher resolution = more gpu power needed = more cost.

Would rather run 1080p @ 24" and bung the fsaa up

[weirdoku]

More cinematic innit.

[HippY]

to be honest, now I am lost in World of Warcrafts new expansion

there is something fresh in it, that I love

[forteh]

I just accidentally a crucial SSD

[Muel]

For everyone still stuck in the 2009 mindset of "writes are bad for SSDs maaannnn": http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

My next build will have no spinning disks in it at all.

[forteh]

I specced kingston 3k hyperx ssds for our solidworks cad stations, they're rediculously fast and by all accounts plenty of life in them!

The data we regularly work with is backed up daily onto a local platter drive so we have disaster management in place. The only thing that would prevent me from having a fully solid state storage solution is the lack of size at the moment, the speed at which they are coming down in price and increasing in capacity is scary though

Mine is only a 128gb, however that is more than enough to host windows, arma3 and solidworks - Infact my kingston ssd on this machine at work is 128gb and is hosting exactly windows, arma3 and solidworks (plus associated software) with 50+gig free. All other games can be hosted on the SSHD which is plenty fast enough for most situations.

Currently if I load up arma3 on the SSHD without any of the arma files cached onto the NAND it takes probably 30 odd seconds to load up the mission editor, once the files have been cached this drops down to 4-5 seconds. However because arma3 streams gigabytes of data constantly the 7200 platter is a bottleneck for the whole system, it was a good 20-30% faster when I had 4gb of the map/terrain/structures/plants data written to a ramdisk.

[weirdoku]

I have a 128GB SSD as my boot drive. Still using a 1TB hard drive as SSDs are £300 for anything close to 1TB which is what I need.

[HippY]

I got a 250GB MX100 for £70, I have an 1 TB HDD, but to be honest, you can feel and see when it switches from SSD to HDD... next PC will be SSD-s only, especially how the prices are going down

[forteh]

I got the 128GB mx100 for 35 quid new in box so about right on the money, it has much slower write speeds than the larger drives (only 150mb/s against 4-500) but that isn't really an issue because I need the read speed more. Backed up with my 1Tb seagate sshd for storage which is far from a slouch, especially if you're accessing the same files multiple times.

[forteh]

I've now stabilised the cpu at 4.2ghz (20x210) with 70°C peak temperature in prime95

With the speedstep and powersaving gubbins turned on it idles at 6°C above ambient, that is using set voltage rather than offset; now I have determined the required stable vcore I can set the offset voltage which will allow it to drop down to minimal. As it is the cpu fan stops when idling

SSD should hopefully turn up today or tomorrow, then got to figure out how to split the steam cache/repository across two drives, I want arma3 to be the only game installed on C, the rest can run off the 1TB drive.

[forteh]

SSD installed, the cloning/backup software bundled with it to migrate the existing disk to the ssd is shite so did a fresh install of windows

Couldn't get steam to recognise the moved arma3 cache so had to redownload 10 gig (thank god for 4.5mb/sec!) but it's all sorted now. With windows and arma on the ssd it still has 87gig free so loads of space for solidworks + any other games that warrant the use of the disk; machine now boots from button press to desktop in 20 seconds, that's including 11 seconds for bios to load!

Got arma back up and running, it managed to lose all my control bindings though so that needed setting up again, also stopped recognising freetrack for the headtracking setup. Ended up switching to facetracknoir which once configured actually runs a little better so happy days

[HippY]

SSD installed, the cloning/backup software bundled with it to migrate the existing disk to the ssd is shite so did a fresh install of windows

Couldn't get steam to recognise the moved arma3 cache so had to redownload 10 gig (thank god for 4.5mb/sec!) but it's all sorted now. With windows and arma on the ssd it still has 87gig free so loads of space for solidworks + any other games that warrant the use of the disk; machine now boots from button press to desktop in 20 seconds, that's including 11 seconds for bios to load!

Got arma back up and running, it managed to lose all my control bindings though so that needed setting up again, also stopped recognising freetrack for the headtracking setup. Ended up switching to facetracknoir which once configured actually runs a little better so happy days

A fresh install of Win is never bad

Get Windows 8.1 ( do not even consider 8) as it gets better boot times ( even on HDD it is quick) and it is great to use once you get used to it!

I have a win 8 laptop, and whereas that is a UI disaster, 8.1 is what it should be

[forteh]

Have had a couple of personal recommendations for 8.1 and I have a genuine copy of 8 pro that can be upgraded; but it doesn't want to activate

Tried the automated phone activation and that wouldn't work, couldn't be bothered to hold on to speak to someone so just reinstalled 7

At the end of the day 7 uses less ram and if I'm using solidworks, 8gb is not gonna get very far as it is, the more I have available the better!

[Muel]

A fresh install of Win is never bad

Get Windows 8.1 ( do not even consider 8) as it gets better boot times ( even on HDD it is quick) and it is great to use once you get used to it!

I have a win 8 laptop, and whereas that is a UI disaster, 8.1 is what it should be

Any install of Windows is always bad.

Ed for the love of f**k don't do it. W7 is bareable, W8 and W8.1 are more painful than Vista IMO. (I have to test in them on an almost daily basis so it's not like I tried them once and sacked them off...)

Be man. Run linux.

Edited December 10, 2014 by Muel

[weirdoku]

What's your beef with W7?

[forteh]

W7 is great, it simply works

I'll be a man when you can get all games and solidworks to run perfectly on linux

[HippY]

Any install of Windows is always bad.

Ed for the love of f**k don't do it. W7 is bareable, W8 and W8.1 are more painful than Vista IMO. (I have to test in them on an almost daily basis so it's not like I tried them once and sacked them off...)

Be man. Run linux.

may I ask why?

Personally I am fine and anchored to Win, as my professional programs are Win only.

If you are a pro linux user, then I do understand you, as the best OS can be what you make yourself, but personally I am okay with programming, not a fan of it.

W7 is simple, windows 8 is a nightmare. I use a win 8 laptop and at school, and holy crap, it is unusable

But windows 8.1 is fine. I like the tile screen, as it is acting as a search bar and turn on off centre, although I would be happier what is in win 10.

Multi monitor support is good, really good, and it uses my Fx 8320 better than Win 7. Kernel part seems to be fine

[Muel]

W7 is great, it simply works

I'll be a man when you can get all games and solidworks to run perfectly on linux

The W7 interface is alright IMO (in fact it's quite pretty), but it's crazy slow (you don't realise how slow until you run a linux OS for a week), insecure and has several really annoying habits. (Leave your computer on overnight to do something and it decides to reboot for you in order to install updates for example). It doesn't "simply work" either, you have to install anti-virus software and firewalls and cleanup tools and do disk defrags and wipe the whole lot every year and reinstall just to stop it slowing down even further?! (Maybe not everyone but I had to).

You'll never be a man then IMO mate, it'll always be compromised. It really angers me to admit it, but for a lot of people it's still the only option, in the same way that if you're a web designer, you really need a mac.

may I ask why?

Personally I am fine and anchored to Win, as my professional programs are Win only.

If you are a pro linux user, then I do understand you, as the best OS can be what you make yourself, but personally I am okay with programming, not a fan of it.

W7 is simple, windows 8 is a nightmare. I use a win 8 laptop and at school, and holy crap, it is unusable

But windows 8.1 is fine. I like the tile screen, as it is acting as a search bar and turn on off centre, although I would be happier what is in win 10.

Multi monitor support is good, really good, and it uses my Fx 8320 better than Win 7. Kernel part seems to be fine

Personally I don't understand how anyone can like W8 or W8.1, it seems to be more hated than any Windows interface I've ever known. (Apart from maybe Vista but that was more because of how slow it was). I've been using them both for several hours a week since launch to test in at work, and it's by far the worst part of my job. I can't find anything or make anything happen properly and it took me weeks to work out how to shut W8 down!

I don't know many Linux distros these days that are like that. I currently use Xubuntu, which installs as easily as windows (easier with the live CD) and after that it just works. You don't need to be able to program anything to use it. Same goes for Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Kubuntu, and so on. There are literally hundreds of distros to play with and they're mostly fast, open-source and secure.

The only real downside IMO is that you can't run Windows apps easily. I just run Virtual Machines for a lot of stuff though (programming, gaming and software testing), so I currently have VMs for XP with IE6, XP with IE8, Vista with IE7, W7 with IE8, W7 with IE9, W7 with IE10, W7 with IE11, W8 with IE10, W8.1 with IE11, several linux ones for various projects and messing about, W7 with my oldish games installed and XP with my really old games installed. Advantage being I can switch very quickly from one machine to another, and they're versioned so that when Windows inevitably shits itself, I can just roll back to the last snapshot.

Anyways, I shall be doing a long-term test soon to see if a normal laptop user can switch by putting Xubuntu on my girlfriends laptop. With an i5, 6gb of RAM, a 128gb SSD and a 1tb HDD it'll fly. She's not a "power user", she just wants to turn it on, do normal things (browse the web, use skype, etc) then turn it off again.

EDIT: Just booted up my girlfriend's laptop - "Applying registry update 0 of 57,000" - F**K, YOU.

Edited December 11, 2014 by Muel

[forteh]

Pfft you're doing it wrong

I don't use antivirus and the built in firewall has never given me any grief in all the years it's been released. The recent reinstalls have been due to new hardware (hard disks specifically), previously the installation was extant from March 2010

I can't really comment on the slow interface, it responds instantly for me, I don't have anything to compare it to though really. I have nowt against linux and would certainly use it if the major software I use would operate on it.