rec.autos.simulators

The wheel is basically great and has improved my TOCA performance no end - I
am now consitently placed in top 4 cars on any circuit - I was using the
keyboard before - ouch!!!

Have spent about 5 hours on GPL and am already hooked - this is easily the
best Sim I have ever seen on a PC - I work for Silicon Graphics and am not
easily impressed after a 180 degree 5 foot high wrap around screen and
military flight sims to play with.

However, the Saitek wheel seems to have a dead spot in the centre which
means that when I try and turn in smoothly to a corner I am looking at and
waiting for the wheel to turn on the screen rather than looking up the
track.

Is this a set-up problem (on the control panel calibrate dialog the
cross-hairs move after a smaller wheel movement) or did '67 G cars get built
with really sloppy steering(!!).

Hope someone can help and as soon as I get good enough I look forward to
racing on-line.

Regs,

Chris Hill

I bought an R4 too but didn't keep it, as GPL always crashed on loading with it
due to some driver problem.  Glad to hear they got that sorted, as it's got
some nice features.  As for your dead spot, you might try the following:

Move the linearity slider to the left on the GPL options/controls screen.  The
default setup is too far over to the right, probably to accomodate joystick
users.  Experiment; I run mine at or near full-left.

If that doesn't do it, you can hex edit the dinput dll file in your
Windows/System directory to reduce or eliminate the default Windows deadzone,
which is set at 5% of device travel.  That setting works OK for a 70degree
joystick, but is too much for a 270degree wheel.  You'll need a simple hex
editor, which you can download from any number of sites, such as download.com
or shareware.com.  Open your dinput.dll file and go to hex location D8BC.
You'll find the value B8 05, the 05 being the value you're interested in.
Change the 05 to a smaller value, such as 02 or 01, or eliminate the deadzone
entirely by changing it to 00, which I ended up doing.  It makes your wheel
feel much more precise.

Hope this helps,

Steve B.

remove "edy" from address for email

Thanks for the advice - I will try tonight to see if it fixes my problem.

The Saitek came with both a CD and a floppy with driver code in the box. In
my e***ment I just loaded up the drivers from the CD and spent 2
frustrating days trying to get the wheel to work reliably with TOCA and
GPL - then I tried the floppy and since then no complaints.

Latest drivers are now available on the Saitek web-site and seem to solve
any compatibility problems.

Thanks again,

Chris

Daniel

--
    Daniel Lichtenberger, Vienna/Austria

regards,
B Hisham