
Car hacked to play MarioKart 64 - morninj
https://jalopnik.com/this-guy-hacked-his-car-to-play-mario-kart-1793611578
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colanderman
> The hardest control to change from the phyiscal car to the emulator was the
> steering wheel. The emulator only supported two button presses, one to go
> right and the other to go left.

The N64, and every N64 emulator I've seen, all support analog input, which
Mario Kart 64 uses for steering. I don't get this.

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akama
I'm one of the people who made this. This was actually a hackathon project so
we didn't use the analog input and instead faked the keyboard presses to the
emulator.

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colanderman
Figured it was something like that. Sounds like a lot got lost in translation…

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bananabill
You can also hack your Porsche 911 to play doom:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRMpNA86e8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRMpNA86e8Q)

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smdz
A bit of a warning - if you do this, and play for long - you could have
muscle-memory leak into your real-world driving. Take breaks and drive safe!

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hectorhector
Here's the blog post from the hack's author:
[https://www.avidhacker.com/2016/02/29/catchMeIfYouCan/](https://www.avidhacker.com/2016/02/29/catchMeIfYouCan/)

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dogma1138
The car wasn't "hacked" they are reading the canbus and using that data as an
input for the controls of a game that runs on a separate computer.

This isn't different than using a USB steering wheel and pedals setup.

It also requires no "hacking" just access to the canbus which can be accessed
in most cars through an interface under the steering wheel or in the glovebox.

As long as your car is fairly new all the driver inputs will be transmitted
over the canbus.

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gfo
> We ended up solving the problem by not continously pushing the button down
> when turning. The further the wheel is turned to the left or right, the
> greater amount of time the button stays down and the further the car turns.

I'm a little confused at this statement. Does this mean they just had it
tapping 'left' or 'right' instead of holding the button down initially?

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pimlottc
I interpreted it to mean they used pulse-width modulation, varying the % of
time the button was being pressed in relationship to how far the wheel was
turned. It's the same trick used to control LED brightness, even though the
light only has binary ON and OFF states.

[https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/pulse-width-
modulation](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/pulse-width-modulation)

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akama
Hi, I'm actually one of the people who wrote this. That's exactly correct.

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isoprophlex
Really cool idea. Only, there's no way I could sensibly use my car's steering
wheel to control a game without having the engine running for the power
steering... I couldn't make it out in the video, but wouldn't this also wear
out the tires in less than no time (due to friction with the ground)?

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demarq
A number of cars are starting to appear with electric steering, bmw and mercs
mostly. Maybe there is some way do turn off the linkage?

Not an expert here.Either way this would make waiting for your passengers so
much more enjoyable!!

