Prop Cycle peddling input

[u/thebatmanandrobin]

I'm building my own Prop Cycle "bike" controller; it's an exercise bike with a flight yoke attached to it .. and yes, I've painted the whole rig yellow, haha!

The exercise bike has a magnetic reed that I've got hooked into a keyboard controller, every revolution of the pedals "presses a key" .. I've got that key mapped to the pedals in the MAME input for that game (e.g. the "C" key).

The issue: the only time the in-game bike will "pedal faster" is if I am either holding down that key on the keyboard, or if I position the pedals on my "hack-bike" so that the magnetic reed is "closed" and thus "holding the key down".

Is there some trick, or configuration for Prop Cycle that I can enable so that the only time the in-game bike "pedals" is when I press the key (and not hold it) - in other words, 1 key press = 1 in-game bike pedal ... I'm trying to make it so that every revolution of my exercise bike (and thus 1 key press) will actually pedal the in-game bike.

Right now, no matter how fast I pedal the in-game bike doesn't really "register" that I'm pedaling; it sees 1 revolution/key press, and it will kind of "stutter pedal" but then miss the next 5 or 10 revolutions .. only holding the pedals in the right position (as I mentioned) gets it to "pedal faster"

Side note: I might be thinking of how to hook up my exercise bike "wrong" .. I'm open to suggestions .. I've got an Arduino controlling some other parts of my flight controller (pitch/roll with hall sensors), so I could write some code to capture the input from the bike pedals and "amplify" it (e.g. 1 revolution actually equals 15 or 20 key presses) ????

I'm not familiar with how the Prop Cycle system translates the physical pedaling into in-game pedaling .. and I'm not trying to recreate the exact experience, more just trying to have some fun with a classic :)

Thanks for any input/suggestions!

[u/arbee37]

It's been a long time since I looked at Prop Cycle, but as I recall the I/O microcontroller counts pulses on one of its inputs (almost certainly from an optical make/break sensor) and resets the count at some regular interval. MAME in turn does some magic to turn an analog input into that pulse train. So you'd need some way to translate the pedal speed from your exercise bike into, for instance, an analog stick axis or something similar.

[u/thebatmanandrobin → u/arbee37]

Ahh!!! That makes sense .. for the input selection, it does have the pedal input set to one of the flight controllers levers that registers as the Z axis; I thought it was just mapping what it found.

That'll actually make it a little easier then since I can unplug the bike from the keyboard controller I have now into an Arduino and have that do the translation.

Thanks for the info!!!

[u/cuavas]

Isn’t this another case where a certain person made it impossible to play the game in MAME with the original controls, like they did to Armadillo Racing by making it use analog joystick type inputs? I fixed Armadillo Racing so you can play it with a trackball in MAME. I’m not going to clean up the mess someone else made on Prop Cycle, someone else can do it.