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?