Crap... you know I actually started my post, about this conclusion you
found 1st, (maybe noise in soundcards?)
But decided it was way to long ago to be releveant... One other thing I
was going to say was I recall someone (was it Wilshe) found that grounding
the pedals & wheel and PC at same place, reduced noise or something like
that too? since then Ecci put in ground wire, (they were game port also at
least at 1st).
Anyway, the a few moments ago my far fetch theory I started post to ya
Remco, was:
I recall early when the PC's went over the 600mhz VLB was the rage I think
it was, everyone who was serious *** with wheels, had to have a GOOD
soundcard, it seems to me anyway, (which as you discoverd the symptom I was
unable to figure this out...) Back then, I didn't accept the thought: if
cheap cards (blaster clones) were more suseptable to noise/spiking, then it
had to be the sound cards... Thus back when I had a POS Sound Galaxy
soundcard from company, everyone else was having little trouble with wheels,
but mine was terrible. because I had NOT made the connection about the
soundcar/gameport/syntesizer port I think we all just assumed that the fix
was to get a Thrustmaster ACM card. In fact MANY went with the PDPI which
was better? It converted alanog inputs from gamport, to digital info
without processor time being taken, and as always is a plus. I think what
kept me from PDPI (price is one reason but at the time, I had one PCI slot?)
and my ACM card was locally available, was in the end same fix of getting
the wheels signal into the PC without noise.
..
Remco Moedt enlightened us with:
>> Remco...
>> I bet you, the root of the problem is how much of a task the
>> software & drivers is on the system... sidewinder drivers prolly do
>> things, like buffer on a couple CPU cycles and? Well, i read your
>> problem, and seem ISI stuff is pretty bloated. so I was Thinking of
>> code and execution here, where as you prolly having the "Visual
>> Basic" coded generic driver support with overhead & 'just in case
>> code that is still in there', where as, rest of us have drivers
>> coded in assembly, without the fat... again that is my anology to
>> it, now your CPU & GAME are tied up calculating polygons & physics
>> and in there it has to ask, "OK where is the wheel, brake, &
>> Throttle" and the driver which is still (imagining opening NEW
>> Microsoft Internet explorer, EVERY time you want to view a different
>> page) well the driver didnt have the answer yet, so CPU and stuff
>> gets, "um hell I dont know yet, still polling xx" cpu goes "shit I
>> gotta go..." and a unset (random number generated) variable is
>> thrown in as the input... which is seen as a spike...
>> Just me and my theory
> After a lot of testing I've come to the conclusion the base of the
> problem isn't rFactor, but my system. The sound is causing noise
> in the gameportreadings. The reason I didn't catch this before has to
> do with the following things:
> You can't turn off the music in the PLR file.
> When you turn down the volume in rFactor to 0%, it still plays the
> music.
> Normally you don't have sound when you're in the Windows Game
> Controllers Applet. When I checked the status in the Applet while
> playing music, I saw some spiking.
> The reason I don't see spiking in Papyrus based games had to do, I
> guess, with some kind of filter. For example, keep the last x samples,
> drop the lowest and highest value, and use the mean of the remaining
> values. That will solve 99% of the problems.
> Anyway, I'm trying my Audigy2 soundcard instead of the onboard
> soundcard tonight, I hope that will solve it.
> Cheers!
> Remco
>> Remco Moedt enlightened us with:
>>> On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:41:50 -0500, Dave Henrie
>>>>>> Sounds like bad pots to me.
>>>>> But then I should see the spiking in the game controller applet,
>>>>> NR2003 and GPL aswell.....there the values are rocksolid.
>>>>> Cheers!
>>>>> Remco
>>>> Papyrus has a complete controller applet that is independant of
>>>> Windows. It goes back to the dos days when programmers had to
>>>> write that stuff themselves.
>>>> ISI has always used windows based controllers. So my guess is,
>>>> you are using a soundport with Windows XP. From what I understand,
>>>> XP does not work will with soundports. My guess is, the Papy
>>>> dedicated controller code avoids the issue, but the ISI sims cannot
>>>> since they work with windows.
>>> I used the DirectInput driver in GPL and NR2003, both worked fine.
>>> Also the Game Controller Applet in Windows doesn't give me the
>>> noise.
>>> Cheers!
>>> Remco
