MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - MAME and my steering wheel dilema...please help :(

Hello everyone and Happy New Year.

I have a problem with my steering wheel and MAME. I will explain as best as I can so please bare with me.

As many of you know, I have a force feedback steering wheel and love racing games. The wheel is an ECCI 7000 FFB wheel. Now just to be clear, I am NOT writing this post to ask the mame devs to support ffb.

The problem is, my wheel rotates 900 degrees. As a result, playing games that do not support force feedback makes my wheel feel sloppy and without any resistance what so ever.

So...to resolve this, a friend of mine from the x360ce boards wrote a custom dll file for me, that allows me to apply any amount of resistance to the wheel, so that it feels like there's a virtual spring inside, giving it that old school arcade "Pole Position" feel. It may not be ffb, but it gets the job done with those games that do not support FFB or do not feature the ability to adjust a center spring effect on wheels.

So this little dll file comes in pretty handy with most programs. But there is a catch....the dll file uses the xinput code, and therefore turns my wheel into, you can say, an "Xbox 360" analog device. Any program that supports Xinput right out the box, supports this dll file and thus my wheel, complete with centering spring effects and all.

But....I have discovered that MAME unfortunately does not. If MAME supported xinput, I would be able to use my wheel and apply the necessary spring-like effects to give it just the right amount of tension.

Therefore I am asking anyone, if they know of any version of MAME that supports xinput? Or perhaps a utility that allows any version of MAME to acknowledge and be compatible with xinput? It would really help. Like I said it's not FFB but it's at least something.

Please let me know.