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Hi all,

This is a very open question: I have a spare screen, speakers, and a cheap steering wheel and I was thinking of rolling them into a little racing car sim for my son (he's turning three in July). My main contribution would be jigsawing and painting and gluing together a little seat / desk in the shape of a racing car. My main obstacle at the moment is what to put in it. There are a lot of options. They all need to be able to support the Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Experience, and provide DVI or VGA input to the monitor.

1. I have a Raspberry Pi which I was going to use, but I don't think that any Linux racers are ported to OpenGL ES1.1; and I don't think that the (many) emulators will cooperate with the steering wheel. The guys who maintain TORCS commented (in 2010) that a port should be trivial (presumably because not many advanced OpenGL features are used.) But I don't think they mean 'you can do it without learning anything about OpenGL', and I'd be starting from scratch with very little knowledge of C.
There is Quake Rally, a mod for Open Arena, which does run on a Pi, but this is getting complicated.

2. I could spend some money:
2a. A FM2 board and a Richland APU (Linux open source support for graphics on Richland is working pretty well). I thought it would be fun to have a tower cooler like a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 emerging from the hood.
2b. I could get an old Playstation (2?3?) or Xbox 360.
2c. I have an Athlon 245, Ram, a spare HDD and an nvidia GT210, and a spare Windows 8 license sitting in boxes. An old AM3 board and a case and PSU would be an alternative to a new FM2 board.
2d. Something else?

So I thought I would consult the great council of chiefs: any thoughts?

atcrank wrote:

Hi all,

This is a very open question: I have a spare screen, speakers, and a cheap steering wheel and I was thinking of rolling them into a little racing car sim for my son (he's turning three in July). My main contribution would be jigsawing and painting and gluing together a little seat / desk in the shape of a racing car. My main obstacle at the moment is what to put in it. There are a lot of options. They all need to be able to support the Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Experience, and provide DVI or VGA input to the monitor.

2. I could spend some money:
2a. A FM2 board and a Richland APU (Linux open source support for graphics on Richland is working pretty well). I thought it would be fun to have a tower cooler like a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 emerging from the hood.
2b. I could get an old Playstation (2?3?) or Xbox 360.
2c. I have an Athlon 245, Ram, a spare HDD and an nvidia GT210, and a spare Windows 8 license sitting in boxes. An old AM3 board and a case and PSU would be an alternative to a new FM2 board.
2d. Something else?

So I thought I would consult the great council of chiefs: any thoughts?

Option 2C will run RFactor (rev 1) well enough if you limit the filtering. Anisotropic is admittedly handy for a race sim, given the foreshortened road textures. The GT210's anemic memory bandwidth will probably limit any filtering to a bare minimum. That said, I doubt a 3 year old would notice.

Some of the kid-friendly mods (all free.)

http://www.rfactorcentral.com/detail.cfm?ID=Miniville
Forgiving physics and a fun racetrack.

Or drive on historic (real) circuits!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ve2tzlhdCM
(I suppose the the original Monza is a bit of a snooze at 50 MPH...)

Or....
http://www.rfactorcentral.com/detail.cf ... nker%20Cup


RFactor has hundreds of cars, and hundreds of tracks, the vast majority of which are free mods. For $28 you can't go too far wrong.
The only caveat is that you may need to dig into ini files to tweak the controller, and may need to shuffle directories to install some tracks. None of this is too daunting, but the program environment isn't as 'one click' user friendly as it might be. The program will make full, proper use of dang near any controller on the market.

Hello?

Is that going to work?

It's your thread, please participate!

Hi Geonerd! Apologies for dropping out there. Child No2 arrived shortly after I posted this and I neglected to come back!

Thanks very much for those excellent suggestions - I had not seen them. I've confirmed that the Quake Rally mod will run on the Raspberry Pi, but I think you have to either get a big overclock going or run in a small 1280 x 720 window to get the frame rates. So a new Mobo for the old desktop gear (2c) seems appropriate - I can beef up the gpu, maybe. It might also help to have a new mobo wrt this thread (viewtopic.php?f=36&t=93619&p=1202801#p1202801).

Fabricating the car is going better than I expected, except that it is probably bigger than a real F1 cockpit and hence will fit him well when he is fifteen, and less well until then. I might put up some pics.

Live For Speed - Runs pretty well in Linux under WINE. Might want to consider that for your 2C Build.

Wow, that's another great option! Thanks!

Progress Update: just final assembly to go.

Hardware - I got a 970 mobo for my main pc, freeing up the M4A785T-M for this machine. Athlon X2 245, 4GB Ram, 1 x 640GB WD Blue HD (so old I can't remember what its out of) + NV GTS 250 (A$15! - works so much better than my 7790 in Linux that it is not funny (in fairness, older AMD cards are also a lot better than my 7790)). Case is a Silverstone Precision09 - deserves the high review (A$45) + Corsair VS450 (A$55).

Ubuntu with TORCS and SuperTuxKart so far: I couldn't bear to part with my spare Win8 key just yet - the basic concepts of steering are still pretty foreign. Steering wheel set has a Ferrari prancing horse logo (son thinks its Hairy Mclairy - a future Daniel Ricciardo he is probably not

Hardware store hardware:

pic.twitter.com/Xsi16O8zSj