Disclaimer: I take no responsibility if you fry your wheel or your I/O while attempting to do this mod!
If you find any errors feel free to correct me!
At the beginning of the year I pulled the trigger and bought a beaten up Sega Naomi Universal Cab with an ugly LCD and an raspberry pi installed into it for 170€. I put very hard work and money into it and restored it nicely.
After a while I decided that I want to play Crazy Taxi on it, as I am able to netboot any game via my raspberry pi setup. Problem is: You cannot play any racing games on there without a wheel.
I searched the WWW for information and found out that the ingenious mitsurugi-w created the S-JIHP helper pcb to help with such matters. But it was not what I was looking for because I don't need my wheel to be compatible with every racing game on the Naomi and I didn't want to spend that amount of money.
After a bit more research I found a guy, Logan McCloud, to be specific that did this conversion. I wrote him on arcade-projects.com and he kindly replied that he could send me his old notes to help with the conversion.
So he send me his stuff and I thought, hey - easy going - now I have the tutorial to convert one myself.
As it turns out it wouldn't be that easy, cuz he had the Wingman GP wheel and I had the old Formula Force.
Yet here we begin:
First things first, you gotta dismantle the pedals and the steering wheel.
With the Formula Force this wasn't as straightforward as it should be but eventually I took it apart
The OG badboy: Logitech Formula Force
Underside with tons of screws...
Sneakpeak into the guts with the removable connectors still attached
The Main PCB - Hellofalot tech in there
The steering mechanism with pot and motor
Guts of the pedals
The pots of the pedals
The cable going to the main unit
Luckily the pedals already had a common 5V line and common ground so there was absolutely nothing to do and I put them back together.
Common means that both pots share 1 line for GND and another one for the +5V. This is essential, remember that!
Here is where my memory gets a bit dark. I got the steering wheel working but I cannot remember if this picture shows the correct wiring or if I experimented with the wiring because the pedals didn't work, so no warranty here if thats correct. Please keep that in mind!
Anyhow: The wheel worked fine but I ran into an issue with the pedals. Without the case the pedals worked fine but with the case attached they didn't travel far enough to register the input. After guessing and trying for a while I figured I'd go with the Logitech GT Force I also had laying around and throw the though of turning the Formula Force into my Naomi wheel into the bin.
Thank you for reading anyway - the next part really gets you going, I promise! ;)
If you wanna have something like this please continue!
First and foremost be aware that this conversion and populated inputs are made for Crazy Taxi! I am also able to run Clubkart and Initial D with it perfectly, although the shifter for Initial D is factory mapped to the 2nd Players Up/Down on the Joystick, whats really convenient btw. Mario Kart Arcade GP on my Triforce also works with the wheel but the item button does not work!
You need 1pc AMP UP connector with 12 male contacts for the 1P connector on the I/O
1pc AMP UP connector with 6 male contacts for the 1P analogue connector on the I/O
12pcs male pins for the AMP UP connectors (better buy more)
A pair of crimp pliers
Soldering Iron or Station
Multimeter
Solder and maybe flux, depending on your liking
So above you can see the connectors that interest us!
What we need to populate with our inputs (in green):
4-3-2-1 < ANALOG 4-3-2-1 < 1P
8-7-6-5 < INPUT 8-7-6-5 < INPUT
12-11-10-9
ANALOG INPUT
Pin 1 ANALOG VREF = 5V
Pin 3 ANALOG CH0 = Steering
Pin 4 ANALOG CH1 = Gas
Pin 5 ANALOG CH2 = Brake
Pin 8 ANALOG GND REF = GND
1P INPUT
Pin 1 1P START = Start
Pin 4 1P UP = Drive
Pin 5 1P DOWN = Reverse
Pin 6 1P Switch 1
Pin 7 1P Switch 2
Pin 12 GND
The white cable and the tiny black cable on the right are attached to GND.
The black cable is connects to the GND line on the pedals, which you can see on the left side.
Also on the left side: the leftmost red cable is connected to ANALOG CH2 and the pink cable besides that goes to ANALOG CH1.
The red cables attached near the connector on the left are the 5V cables. The smaller of the two goes to the 5V line on the pedals.
Here I tapped all the buttons and the pot of the steering wheel directly from the connector on the underside of the pcb. The pinout for this was over at GTplanet.net made by user Werner Winkels. Thank you!
This covers the whole process of the wheel part! Next up is the pedals:
There is not really much too say about the pedals. You take em apart and if it has common GND and common 5V there shouldn't be much to do. Easier said than done. Here came Logan McClouds documents and research in handy.
This is how the pots in my pedals were wired. We need to modify those to look like this:
Now we have the AD1 (ANALOG CH1) and the AD2 (ANALOG CH2) as seperate signals and a common GND and common 5V line.
After I changed that I recognized the same issue as with the Formula Force Pedals. Reason for that was that the pots on the pedals are 50kOhm and the travel in the pedals isn't far enough to register on the Naomi. I simply added a 6kOhm resistor to one of the pots in the pedals to change the resistance of the pot and now it works flawless.
I took me a few hours but I was able to make it. Now I am officially able to play Racing Games (without Force Feedback) on my Naomi that would require a dedicated Driving Cab. Thanks to the whole community, especially arcade-projects.com, Logan McCloud, Mitsurugi-W and Werner Winkels!
Most credit belongs to these guys for figuring shit out! <3
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