rec.autos.simulators

I'm looking to install an adjustable game card in a new pentium &
have seen references to the ACM game card. Who manufactures this card?
I've looked around the www for ACM with no luck. The CH website has
the Gamecard 3 Automatic and Thrustmaster's site has been..er..down.

Or is ACM another acronym...Automatic Card Manipulator?...:-)

TIA

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Tom

___________________________________________________________

Tom Weber

St. Louis, Missouri     http://www.icon-stl.net/~tweber/
____________________________________________________________

The ACM is a Thrustmaster product. I just got one and it works great, my
gameport
on my SB16 crapped out. Maybe the new gamecard3 automatic works fine but
the one
I had caused me to get 1/2 frame per second with EA Sports titles. I saw
other post
about this problem and never found a solution. Also the ACM will allow for
two joystick, four-button support in WIN95. Price range for thew ACM is
$25-45... I got mine at egghead for about $40.

And..

Excellent. Thanx for the input. I'm having an ACM installed in a
new system and I'm counting on you guys to answer the *rest* of
my clueless Win95/Game/Config posts...:-)

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Actually I own BOTH the ACM and the CH Gamecard3.

I bought the CH Gamecard3 first and I used it for about a year. During this
time I found that it has problems working with at least 2 simulations that
I used it with. Apache had a terrible jumpy joystick bug with the CH Gamecard3
this is a known problem and eventually there was a patch for it, and most
importantly, Need for Speed has a big problem with the CH Gamecard3, same
symptoms that Apache had, very jumpy uncontrollable movements.

Since I have invested in a T2 and a CH FSPro, I thought it stupid to have
such poor controls because of the CH gamecard. I went out and bought
the Thrustmaster ACM and have not regretted it since. It is much better
and has a MANUAL speed adjustment that has come in handy a few times, plus
it has not had any problems with any games that I have tried, it especially
works well with Need for Speed.

I do not mean to say that CH makes crappy stuff, only that the Gamecard3
leaves a lot to be desired. I also own a CH Flighstick Pro that has worked
wonderfully for the last 3 years.

If you still want to buy a CH Gamecard3 let me know, I happen to have mine
sitting around that I might sell or trade. If I were you though I would go
with the ACM.

Cheers.

--John
--
-------------------
  John (Joao) Silva
  Seattle, Washington USA.

I also have used an 8 bit SB, SB16 and never had a problem.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Enterprises          Makers of the TSW the best racing
controller.
http://www.ia.net/~thomas   Lifetime warranty. Solid steel construction.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, I used to have terrible calibration problems with ICR2 and Nascar
when I used my SB16 game port, I think it was caused by heat related drift.

Also in Windows95 the SB16 port didn't allow a great enough range of value
to calibrate very well, with the ACM's adjustable speed, I can control how
big the range of values is.

I am by no means saying EVERYONE needs a gamecard, but there are some of us
with certain hardware combinations for which a good gamecard is necessary,
and after spending hundreds of dollars on controllers, it is worth spending
an extra $30 in order to have precise and dependable controller behaviour,
at least in my case I needed one, and am very glad I spent the extra $$.

Cheers.

--John

--
-------------------
  John (Joao) Silva
  Seattle, Washington USA.

--

10/01/96 19:00
---------
Using: OUI TE 1.5 from http://www.dvorak.com

Quality sound cards may not produce joystick drift, but they are not speed
adjustable.  With a T1 plugged into a sound card port in ICR2, the joystick
calibration gives numbers up to 1200 or something.  Using the game card,
the range is compressed to around 6-200.  This makes the steering control a
lot less jumpy around the center position.  You should test this difference
yourself before deciding that game cards are a waste of money.

--
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I've got lots of experience in this area.  If you have one of the quality
sound boards, or if you have the right internal layout of your system,
you don't need the ACM.  For example, I have a Micron PPro 200 with a
Creative Labs AWE32, and while the thermal drift is detectable, it's not
significant.  (On ICR2 the calibration changes about 5 points at each end
of the scale from cold to as hot as I can drive the system.)  However,
I also have a Gateway 486DX2-66 with a generic sound board in it (obviously
this is the predecessor system...).  In that system, the sound board is
mounted directly above the 486 cpu, drawn crudely here in ASCII:

         ---- --- ---   components
        --------------- sound board

         | | | |
        ---------                                       ^
        |  486  |                                       |  up
    -----------------------motherboard planar

On this system, the thermal drift is horrendous.  After about an hour of
running, it's enough to cause the boost on ICR to drop from 45" to just 39"
at full throttle!  In practical effect, it takes an ICR1 lap at Laguna from
63.8 seconds to 67.5 seconds, the difference between pole and last on the
grid...

When I replaced the sound board game port with an ACM in the 486, the thermal
drift disappeared to *zero*.

From what I can tell, if your motherboard is vertically mounted (as it would
be in a tower or minitower configuration), you won't ever have a problem with
this, since airflow would tend not to gather under the sound board components.
However, desktop cases (such as my 486) tend to gather a lot of heat under the
expansion board components if they are mounted horizontally, and this can cause
significant drift.  I am not sure what the situation is if the motherboard
is horizontal and the expansion boards are vertical.  Probably it would only
be an issue if the board is sitting right over the cpu, or if you have a
particularly hot cpu.  (such as an overclocked one!)
--

Brian Wong                              Enterprise Engineering