Ditch the sim rig and use your car instead (2019)

This looks like a fun project, but that's about where I'd draw the line. A few issues right off the bat:

- In all such comparisons, people conveniently leave out build and research time/costs. I suspect that at least a few hundred hours went into this project, which would significantly increase the cost, if we account for hourly rates. Whenever I've run the numbers on similar custom hardware projects, I've come to the conclusion that if I'd simply worked the hours as overtime, I would be getting a much better product even if I bought high-end equipment, and quite a bit cheaper. So, these are strictly for people who enjoy the journey, and as such I find such comparisons insanely misleading.

- What exactly are the wheels doing, when you're turning the steering wheel? Is the car stationary in the garage, or is it lifted? I probably wouldn't want to spend dozens of hours turning my car's wheels in a stationary position, it puts strain on things.

- While on face value it seems like this should be about as real as you can get with sim equipment, I'd argue that it's actually fairly low- to mid-tier. Neither the steering nor the brake pedal will have any adaptive feedback, which is fairly easily obtainable with direct drive wheels and in some high-end pedals.

So all in all, quite a cool project, but not particularly useful or reasonable, IMHO.

>I probably wouldn't want to spend dozens of hours turning my car's wheels in a stationary position, it puts strain on things.

He blew his engine, at a raceway. Something tells me that gently steering back and forth on his garage's polished concrete floor isn't something he is concerned about.

> Neither the steering nor the brake pedal will have any adaptive feedback

I think this is probably the biggest disadvantage compared to using an actual sim wheel. In the linked video demo it looks like the driver is struggling to apply the right amount of steering and correcting after the corners. At times the game footage looks more like someone playing with a gamepad than a wheel.

I don’t like that the Xbox adaptive controller is necessary for this. Microsoft gets praise for how it enables alternate controllers - and it’s great for DIY - but that is only necessary because they use a cryptographic protocol to disallow allow unlicensed controllers in the first place. There’s no reason home brew or third party USB game pads should not work on the Xbox in the first place. Sony is the same. Nintendo at least, while they don’t ‘support’ third party pads, don’t use cryptography to disallow them.

I don't own a console, but I always imagined the motivation was partially to level the playing field for competitive multiplayer games.

I recall playing COD4 online (on PC) and someone had hooked up a controller with rapid-fire and was pwning the noobs, quite literally.