Thanks for all the replies!

I think what I'm going to do is collect all the bits for an overhaul as planned, and possibly perform it over next winter. It's going to take some time to get all the gaskets and seals together, and the over-sized pistons for this bike are proving to be pretty rare now.

I checked the oil injection system today, and it is working as expected so I don't have much to worry about there. I went over the whole bike today to look for lose bolts or oil leaks from the transmission and it's incredibly clean. I think this bike may either have been babied a lot, well taken care of, or the previous owners didn't have the balls to thrash it

The last owner is someone I trust, the only reason I have the bike is because he heard I was looking for one and gave me a deal. He told me he had it tuned up and checked last year when he registered it, but never ended up riding it because he wasn't fond of the power delivery of a 2-stroke.

When I think about it, I know how to do the work on it. I'm just a bit paranoid since it's an engine type I've got little experience with. I'm going to take it to a friend's shop and do what you guys are suggesting, compression test and make sure it's not running lean or rich.

I'm really just looking for a rough idea on when I should start thinking about a rebuild. I'm not planning a rebuild any time soon, and I'd like to see it hit 20k at least before it's ready to come apart. It's going to take quite some time to get all the parts together too, since I plan to do a complete overhaul if I do rebuild it at all.

Actually, now that I think about it, a better question would have been this:
What should I be listening/looking for as an indicator it might be needing a service?

I know what to listen and look for on 4-strokes, but 2-strokes make a totally different sound and I've never been exposed to them enough to learn what a healthy engine sounds like, so I can't tell if mine is or not.

As for oils, I tend to use what the manufacturer recommends, so I should be good on that front. And this thing has oil injection, so I don't have to worry about proper mixing as long as I keep the pump working.

As the title says, I just picked up a 2-stroke street bike. It's a 1972 Yamaha CS5 200 electric. I've had nothing but 4-stroke bikes before, and my only 2-stroke experience is riding a 2-stroke race bike a few times.

This is a question for anyone who has, or has had, 2-stroke bikes.
What's the longevity on the engine like, how many miles can I expect before it needs a rebuild?

I ask because my old bikes were both Honda XL's, and both had a lot of miles on them and showed no signs of needing a rebuild any time soon, even when my 1981 XL125S hit 50k miles it still ran like it was practically new.

I've been told 2-strokes wear out faster, and this old girl is at 12k miles now. It seems to run good, but again I'm not familiar with 2-strokes so I don't know what to listen for.

I've asked this in a few places, trying to get a good idea of a general answer.

Oh man, I took that thing apart so long ago, that post was from 2008. I'm using the pedals as a third pedal and a dead pedal for my current setup.

What I do remember is it came apart pretty easy, and there is a big metal plate at the base of the steering shaft, MS's old hardware division made things really solid.

There where two things wrong, and both where mentioned in this thread. The pot was lose in it's socket, and the spring was relaxed. To fix the first you could use paper to shim the pot's flat side in the hole it sits in, that would make sure it's nice and tight. Just remove the pot, fold up a small bit of paper, and stuff both back in the slot, it should be a somewhat tight fit but not overly so.

The spring can be fixed as mentioned by twisting it in the opposite direction, but it's a strong spring so that is hard. What you could do is shim it in some way, but I can't remember how I did mine so you'll have to figure that out too.

Honestly I found GT5 had so much done to the cars just to make them harder to drive it was stupid.

Like having the default brake balance at 50-50, so every time you buy a car you have to go in and adjust it so the damn thing doesn't oversteer going into EVERY corner. That and the suspension settings are totally buggered on a lot of the cars too, so I had to spend time getting them right.

It took me two hours to get my AW11 MR2 to handle even remotely like the real thing. When it should have right from the get-go, especially considering it was all stock.

I found Forza 3 handled better from square one, and actually seemed somewhat like driving a real car, closer than GT5. Though neither of them handle oversteer correctly, it always feels wrong.

I'm very familiar with that error, I fought with it for a full year, and atidvag2 may not actually be the problem at all, since Nvidia cards will produce a similar error message under the same conditions. If you go into event viewer you should find a critical error message, saying something about an infinite loop which could be caused by drivers or hardware.

The problem is there are so many causes for it that it may even not be the graphics card at all. It's as if it's just a combination of hardware that leads to bad communication, which results in an infinite loop.

I mean I swapped motherboards, ram, graphics card, eventually the CPU even. Seemed I always had a bad combo, no matter what I did. It's a very (and I mean VERY by all the reports I've seen) common issue that is more about hardware than it is software, people blame ATI drivers but they don't see that Nvidia gets the exact same problem, with it showing their drivers as the issue.

People have speculated on so many causes, but ultimately the only way you will solve it is to eliminate things one at a time, try different drivers first and you might be lucky and it goes away. If not check your ram, stress test your CPU, stress test your GPU, check temps all round. Then even if nothing shows up, something is still wrong, and you have to start swapping parts.

I just picked up a Power Color HD 5770 the other day, and I was quite surprised at it's performance for what I paid ($125 Canadian)

This one only has 1 DVI port though, and a VGA and HDMI port as well, so no tripple screen for me (not that I'd want to on this card)

As far as performance, as I said I was impressed, for what I payed I expected budget performance. I'm running Crysis 2 perfectly fine at native resolution, even with my old Quad core Q6600 and DDR2 800 ram. I've even maxed out the settings in a few games I didn't think I would be able too.

Though maybe I'm just not expecting as much because my previous card was so slow

Quote from morpha :

LFS Record does nothing of what you describe, it instructs LFS to make a screenshot. LFS Record would have to request the screenshot (write to disk), load the bmp into memory again (read from disk), do whatever processing it's set up to do and stream it to disk again.

Ah, I thought it was LFS Record itself that was producing the screens, if LFS is producing the screens then yeah, that's not going to work.

Though now that I think about it that way, it would be interesting to integrate LFS Record into LFS, then you could have the functionality I described.

I just had a thought. If LFS Record is dumping frames to your hard drive as images, wouldn't it be possible to have LFS Record output a video file instead?

It could render it out like an animation program, frame by frame as it does now, but it could even compress it as it goes, at any resolution/compression level you want.

I don't think you have the time to do that yourself, or you probably would have, but if you plan on going open source I'd wonder just how much work it'd be for someone else to do that.

I like how they've put a 16+ age rating on the wheel
But I can just see it now, people not following that and their kids ending up with broken thumbs.

I know someone on here actually posted that their G25 broke their thumb at some point, so if this is that much more powerful it could be an issue.

Now we just have to see if Logitech decides to come back with a better unit of their own. I really want to see racing wheels get to the point that even the lower end ones have really good feature sets, and thats whats going to happen if companies compete for the best.

I have a very tame driving style in a lot of the cars, Generally I don't have problems, even with the RAC. In fact I love the RAC's twitchy behavior, makes for a fun car to drive, kind of like a Dodge viper, make a mistake and it lets you know.

Difficult Track/Car combo for me? I would say the XRG on any track, its just too flipping slow, and I can't pace myself to it, so I undershoot the corners constantly and it kills my lap time. It's just generally not fun for me. For some reason I have an easier time driving the UF1000.

Windows can be very picky at times with USB devices, if you switch ports it has a habit of seeing it as a new device and loading the default drivers instead of the logitech ones.

The only way you are going to fix it is by uninstalling the drivers for the wheel, unplugging it, then reinstall and plug it in when the logitech drivers ask you.

I've had just about every driver based issue with my DFGT, they can be a bit of a pain sometimes, because the defaults read it as a DFP.

Third here, watched it and had to watch it again.

Hit-girl is scary lol, I know it's just a movie but she knows what an AR-10 is, a gun not many people even know exists. I only know because I've studied weapons for a long time, as part of research for a combat sim that'll probably never see a line of code written.

That is an incredibly dangerous thing to do in an emergency situation. If you need to avoid something you should make one steering input, around the object.

Swinging the wheel from side to side will only have one effect, it will unbalance the car and cause a spin. No matter how little you do it, you will add momentum in either direction each time, and that momentum will add up and spin you around.

The safest ways to stop are by pressing the pedal as hard as you can (In an ABS equipped car) and steering around the hazard. Or in a car without ABS, there are two alternatives.

Lock-steer-release, in which you do exactly that. You lock up, turn the wheel between a quarter and a half turn depending on steering ratio, then release the brakes. This will effectively "shove" the front end over at mid-low speeds, and allow you to reapply the brakes in a safe direction. I wouldn't recommend doing it at high speeds because it can cause a spin.

The second is Threshold braking, which is pretty simple in text, but requires practice, practice, and more practice. One thing to remember is that if you have to steer while threshold braking, you need to lift off the brake pedal gradually as you turn the wheel, the more you turn it, the more you lift off the brakes.

I don't mention Cadence braking because it's not effective both in my own experience and in the tests I've seen.

I would go back to your buddy and tell him to learn something about how his car handles, he is going to get himself and possibly others hurt if he keeps thinking that is going to work. It's guaranteed to make the car spin at some point.

@ATiRAGEPRO
I have to agree 100% on that, it's the most frustrating and backwards thinking you can imagine. But people seem to somehow think it's going to work that way.



If someone is going to be a retard, they are going to do so regardless if it's through text or voice. I've been on thousands of servers spanning more than a decade of voip enabled gaming, many more servers with text chat before that. You know what the universal solution is for people that act stupid? A KICK OR BAN. Giving them voice communication does not make them kick or ban proof, you can still do it.

Also, You know how often I've come across morons? I can count it out even after said decades and thousands of servers. I come across no more than one or two retards a month, A WHOLE MONTH. And I used to play every day, for a few hours.

Quote from dadge :

....

Well, other than that... didn't read that

Hate to say it, but DON'T try anything the others here are saying you should, it's a waste of time and I know that from experience.

It isn't a bad install of windows, a corrupt driver, or a wrong driver version. Your graphics card, or possibly some other component in your computer is damaged or defective and no amount of messing with software will do anything, believe me, I tried it all when I had that error, I spent more than a year fighting with it.

You are going to sell a graphics card you know is potentially defective?

Thats a great way to hurt your Ebay rating, the buyer will most likely come back to you wanting his or her money back.

Quote from dadge :

i think this is the link you were looking for

lol, That is epic.

The infinite loop error is very rarely caused by software and from my experience ATI's drivers have been just fine

Every case of the infinite loop I've encountered has been hardware, either a bad motherboard, ram, or even a power supply that isn't sufficient to run the system can cause it. If it's happening in games it's likely to do with either the CPU not getting enough power, or the GPU.

Since the graphics card is new that would by my first suspicion and I'd get that replaced. If the error continues to come up after that (But didn't before the new card) it's possible the graphics card could have damaged the AGP bus or another part in line on the motherboard. ATI's HD series cards are internally PCI-e and the AGP versions use a chip on the card to make the switch to AGP, if this bus converter was defective it could have damaged the motherboard.

If it comes down to it, you could be looking at a new motherboard, which means new ram, a new cpu, and the switch to PCI-e. Thats what happened to me in the end, I simply could not get rid of the error once it started.

Edit: Also, some games stress the hardware more than others, or use features others don't. This can lead to the card working fine for some, and failing all together with others.

I have had the same issue on two separate computers with different graphics cards, one was a defective graphics card, the other I never determined because even changing the card didn't make it go away.

The exact error you are getting is called an infinite loop, what happens is either your CPU or your GPU begins repeating the same instruction over and over because the other stopped responding. Since it never starts responding again the other continues this until it gives up and your computer auto restarts.

This can be caused by so many things that you'll have to do some component swapping to find out which. If you just put the graphics card in, it's likely defective. If the error continues after swapping it, it could be anything from ram to CPU, even the motherboard could be causing it.

There is still an issue with installing the DFGT sometimes, windows likes to pick it up as the DFP and some of the buttons don't work regardless of driver version.

What you need to do is completely remove the drivers, with the wheel unplugged. Then reinstall the drivers and only plug the wheel in when it asks you, making sure the power and pedals are also connected. That should allow the logitec drivers to detect it as a DFGT instead of the default DFP setting windows uses.

I had issues with this when I first got my DFGT.

ah, I just looked at the image again and you didn't tap into the wires like I did, I did away with the wheel board and just used the wires directly. As it turns out there are only six wires for the eight buttons.

The board is designed so that it has two negative wires instead of one. Each button doesn't have it's own negative wire. Depending on which negative you ground one of the four leads to determines which button it registers. Negative one makes 1,3,5 and 7. Negative two makes for buttons 2,4,6, and 8.

The way you did it means you don't have to deal with any of that nonsense, The design for my shifter meant that I would have to deal with it either way, because there are no push buttons, instead there are metal prongs on the gates and stick that make the connection. I had to figure out how to switch the prongs on the stick from one negative to the other for all eight gates to work.

Edit: I should add that after figuring that out, my new design is going to be set up to work with the wiring scheme of either a usb game pad, or the six wire setup the sidewinder uses.

Last edited by DragonCommando, Sun, 18 Apr 2010 21:28.

These are reasons why I refuse to get a newer car, I'll stick with my old honda motorcycle, or get an old datsun or something. At least with those I don't have to worry about the electronic baby sitter second guessing me.

I have dealt with a stuck throttle only once, on my first motorcycle, an old 77' honda. It was just common sense to me to cut the ignition, and if I coulden't do that, it's not hard to put a bike in neutral or pull the clutch in. Hell, I've driven enough cars with that electronic crap to know you CAN do it in one of those too.

Some people just don't have the mindset to drive, they can't comprehend the mechanics of driving a motor vehicle.

Last edited by DragonCommando, Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:21.

You have the same setup I have, a DFGT and a microsoft sidewinder. I even use the sidewinder pedals as a clutch and foot rest.

I like how you used the push buttons, so you can seperate both the negative lines they used on the sidewinder board. My first shifter I had to actualy switch between the negative lines using a custom switch at the bottom of the stick, so I could use all eight buttons. Made things realy complicated and unreliable. But that thing was made of lego and a knex set, so it was garanteed to be unreliable.

I'm actualy working on the design for a very simple DIY shifter that I can post building instructions for, I want it to be reliable and simple to build, as well as feel realistic. I already have the designs on paper, it's just building it so I can hammer out the details before I put it up for other people to use.