Emulating steering on old driving games like Pole Position?

[sirlynxalot]

There's a bunch of old driving games like Pole Position, TX-1 and Road Blasters that basically use a spinner for the steering wheel that can rotate freely instead of a steering wheel that snaps back to center.  As a result, (unless I'm missing something) MAME does not provide the functionality to return the wheel to center in its controls options.

 

Without being able to snap the wheel back to center, I find it very difficult to play these games with steering simply mapped to either keyboard keys, or an analogue joystick.  

 

What do you all do with respect to emulating these kinds of games?  Are there some software programs/hacks that might  make the steering more enjoyable? Do you set up some kind of USB spinner to play these games?

Edited April 22, 2020 by sirlynxalot

[mr_me]

An analog control doesn't emulate a spinner very well.  For games like Pole Position, if you don't have a spinner, you can map the mouse axis to the steering.  Otherwise you can map a thumbstick or buttons to the steering increment and decrement inputs in mame; it works.  It's not ideal but I play Pole Position with a mouse and keyboard.

[fluxit]

My spinner is based on an inverted optical mouse board with a chunk of light foam rubber as the "encoder wheel." It works well for Pole Position and TX-1.