IS SIMAGIC WORTH IT IN 2023? - Ecosystem Overview

hey guys will here so today's video has been a very very long time coming this is probably one of the most requested videos that we've had for a couple of years now here at boosted media so today we have a full complete ecosystem from SIM magic that we're going to be checking out we've got their p1000 pedals here with all of the upgrades available other than just the hydraulic upgrade kit which hopefully we'll be looking at a little bit later on we've got their Alpha mini wheelbase we've got their GT pro hub with a 330 mm leather round wheel we've got their brand newly released hydraulic handbrake which is very exciting and then also the hspeed 8 pattern and sequential shifter now this isn't a full review video today what we're going to be doing is a bit of a kind of First Look I guess first impressions of the Sim magic ecosystem overall cuz it has been a very long time since we've had any Sim magic products through the uh boosted media studio so let's dive in today see what these products are like in terms of the hardware and the driving experience at a top level and then over the coming months we're going to be diving into each of these individual products in a lot more detail so definitely subscribe so don't miss out on that but let's get started so before we get started today there is some really important information that you guys need to be aware of now we need to address the elephant in the room straight away here which is the reasons why we haven't touched any Sim magic gear for such a long time here on the channel it has been almost 3 years now I believe since we looked at the uh Sim magic Alpha base uh not to be confused with the alpha mini base and before that we took a look at the uh the M10 now some of you guys will already be aware of some of the issues that we have with Sim magic some of you will be coming into this with absolutely no idea what I'm talking about now I'm not going to go into a massive amount of detail about the things that have happened in the past in today's video if you're interested in all of that detail that is available in our Discord Community uh I just don't see the need to go back into it because that is all in the past now but look suffice to say that basically we had a couple of issues with a particular employee at Sim magic now I want to make it very clear that it was never an issue with the brand as a whole it was an issue with the contact person that we had at Sim magic now a couple just to give you a basic understanding there are a couple of issues when we reviewed some products ourselves some things that I wasn't particularly happy with with how they dealt with us specifically uh and there was also some pretty major issues with another reviewer who was a personal friend of mine and um I really wasn't happy with the way they dealt with some of the negative feedback that he had on some of his review videos now admittedly I didn't think that he handled it particularly well either but look the long and the short of it was basically that I was in a situation where I was personally quite angry and upset with this particular individual and I felt that that put me in a position where I couldn't really get past that and be objective with my uh with my review videos our job as reviewers is to try and put that aside to the best of our ability and share as much information as we can with you guys as objectively as possible to be honest with you guys I just felt like you know the issues that we had were sufficient that you know it was tainting my view of sim magic as a brand overall and obviously that's my own personal issue it's not something that impacts on your experience with the brand necessarily uh and it certainly doesn't impact on the quality of the hardware or anything like that so what we've done is we've gotten in touch with them we've had a long disc actually quite a number of long discussions you know we still don't see eye to eye on absolutely everything that happened in the past but moving forward I'm happy to say that we have a good professional working relationship together and I'm hoping at least that we don't see any more issues like what we've seen in the past I've expressed my concerns and you know stated what I would like to see moving forward uh and obviously that is things like you know we don't want to be attacked if we say something that they don't like about one of their products at the end of the day what we're trying to achieve at least is to provide constructive criticism where we personally feel it's necessary and ultimately just share with you guys what our opinions are of these products that we're reviewing so you can make the best decision possible so yeah basically what you need to know is that there have been issues in the past we've put those issues behind us now on both sides they have loaned us this equipment to check out so we're not going to be keeping most of it like what we do usually here at boosted Min normally we're able to hold on to gear so we can do sort of more long-term testing and you know comparisons in down the road into the future uh they have asked for this stuff back but obviously that's not going to have any sort of impact on you know how we're looking at the products they have told us that we can hold on to it for you know at least a decent amount of time so that we can get through and do all our reviews and take them through the normal process that we'll be taking gear through and yeah I think that's everything that you guys need to be aware of as I said before if you do want to dig in and you know up that that information so you have a better understanding of exactly what issues did happen in the past that information is all available uh it is on our Discord if you want to see it but the important thing is that we've moved forward now and I'm in a place where I feel like that's not going to have an impact on my view of the brand overall which is why we're here today taking a look at the gear so let's go ahead now and get started okay so what we've been doing over the last couple of weeks now is uh we installed all of this gear on one of our test Rigs and we basically just been using it as a complete ecosystem testing it across a variety of different Sim racing and more arcade style titles so everything from f123 all the way through to something more like iRacing so what I was looking at was the experience of using each of the individual products as well as what it's like to actually use sim magic as a complete ecosystem so whether there's any glitches in the software you know whether there's any Hoops that you need to jump through to get things up and running with particular Sim racing titles all those things that I think are going to be important to somebody that's looking at investing in an ecosystem because what we have here is a very very complete ecosystem and that's one of the things that I've been really impressed with jumping back into SIM magic compared to what it was like before back last time we tested they did have a couple of different wheelbases available uh that I don't think they had a set of pedals available quite yet when we last looked at them uh they had a selection of a few different steering wheels but they didn't have a shifter they didn't have a handbrake or anything like that so yeah the experience has been really good just as a complete ecosystem but I want to start off here firstly by going through each of these products and just talking about the overall build quality of the hardware because this is another thing that's really impressed me you you can probably already tell that I am overwhelmingly impressed with how far Sim magic have come since the last time we looked at them I think they've obviously been putting a lot of hard work in not only in the quality of the hardware which always was quite good uh at least from the Alpha Series onwards I wasn't particularly impressed with the M10 but that is a discontinued product now so that doesn't really matter uh but yeah they've obviously been putting a lot of effort into refining their products particularly the pedals the pedals have really really really impressed me so let's start off there and then we'll move away across over towards the shifter so these are the p1000 pedals uh one of the things that I really like about these pedals is they're a modular kind of system and I think they've done a really good job here so you can buy these as a as a basic three pedal set or even a two pedal set if you want to and we're not going to go into pricing and comparisons in today's video otherwise it's going to be 2 hours long but uh suffice to say that there are a lot of various upgrade kits that you can purchase for these pedals depending on the experience that you want to have so you've got all sorts of things like lighting bars you've got this heel plate here which lights up and responds to all sorts of things in the software as you'll see a little bit later on there's another one underneath here as well that projects a nice kind of glow uh on your sim rig if you've got a rig that is sort of conducive to that working properly uh they've also got these haptic motor upgrades which are really really really cool they're only about $50 each and they do a really really good job one of the things that I'm really excited to unpack a little bit more when we get into our dedicated review of these pedals is comparing the experience of using these pedals across to my semic Cube active pedals that I run on my daily driver rig which cost many times more than these pedals do but in terms of the feedback that these are giving you uh in the Driving Experience they're actually quite close surprisingly close so much more powerful than what you get with say your fanatic v3s with a little tiny vibration Motors and there is a lot of stuff that you can do in the software with these as well to fine-tune the experience from amplitude through frequency and all sorts of things another really important Point here is that these haptic Motors are also compatible with simhub which unlocks a whole lot more potential in terms of fine tuning as well so they've done a really good job not only with the hardware but also just the software integration and upgradability of these pedals they're not forcing you to buy a super expensive pedal set if you're not wanting to but then if you want to go down a path of upgrading later on even if you want to upgrade the load cell to a hydraulic based system later on down the track you can do that without having to purchase a whole new set of pedals and look the quality of the hardware is really impressive as well all really nicely machined aluminium here really nice finish on all three of the pedals really we did notice a little bit of squeaking in the brake but a little bit of lubrication took care of that without any issues another thing that I really like here as well is that they have utilized a position sensor as well as the load cell for the brake which is really cool it allows you a few extra adjustments in the software as well as the ability to actually use the angle sensor as the as the mode of input into the Sim as opposed to the load cell which does have a few potential advantages depending on your driving style uh race Beyond matter actually had a video recently that was really interesting interesting where he explored the uh the behavior characteristics of elasa and how alasas actually do relax a little bit after initial input and he actually found that for him using the angle sensor allowed a little bit more accurate input uh for his particular driving style now personally I've never found that to be a particular issue for me it is something that I've observed in the past but the point here for the context of this video is that you have options you can choose whether you want to have angle or load cell and obviously that doesn't have an impact on how the pedal actually feels under your foot now in relation to Pedal feel as well look this pedal set I I gelled with really well very quickly I was within a couple of laps on Pace with the times that I do with my uh with my semic Cube active pedals I've mentioned in the review that we did of those pedals that I didn't find that they made me faster overall the advantages were more just in the feeling and the ability to actually tune the pedal feel without having to swap out elas and make physical adjustments to the pedals now those adjustment characteristics obviously aren't the same with these pedals but in terms of the feeling that you get through the pedals the reaction and The Sensation of vibration characteristics things like that actually really really really good I would say probably 70 to 80% uh there in terms of what you're getting in terms of feedback compared to those active pedals which you consider the price Delta there is pretty darn impressive and look plenty of adjustment available in the pedals too they do include a selection of various different Springs and there is also an elasta upgrade kit too and you can see they're just little elastomers that you insert into the I guess you could call it almost like a cartridge here and again we unpack that when we get into a full review at a later date but look I honestly I I was really happy with the way these felt straight out of the box I actually didn't feel the need to make any adjustments we will obviously experiment with those adjustments later on but yeah immediately felt really really good underfoot absolutely nothing to complain about whatsoever and they look really nice and high class as well no issues with flex or unnecessary movement anywhere uh one thing you will notice is that the uh the haptic feedback Motors are quite noisy but again you can find tune that you can crank it down if they're a little bit too noisy for you that's just something that unavoidable so it's certainly not a complaint with relation to the product but just little details in the refinement even just down to how the motors plug in to little uh DC Jacks in the base itself rather than the wiring kind of running around underneath and being clumsy and you know messy things like that they've obviously just put a lot of time into really refining the overall design I think that really shows in the final product that's a quick rundown on the pedals really really really impressive experience I would rate these very very highly compared to even a lot of pedal sets that we've tested they cost a lot more than these do so definitely Keen to get more stuck into these when we get into the full review at a later date so that brings us to the alpha mini which again really really impressive experience so the alpha mini is a 10 NM Peak direct drive wheelbase and uh look that's that is going to be a little bit too weak for some people I think the majority of people will probably find that it is enough and probably never feel the need to upgrade somewhere between sort of 10 to 14 new M I think is the sweet spot so this is on on the lower end of The Sweet Spot I would say but having said that comparing the experience back toback with something like the Mozza R12 for example 2 newon m more powerful there there there isn't a massive difference in the overall experience here so look I don't think that anybody's going to be disappointed with the uh with the power output level of this but if you are a really big uh you know muscly person then you may find that it's a little bit on the weak side but then of course they do have the alpha which is more powerful and then even the alpha U which is more powerful still if you were wanting that extra power but look in terms of the characteristics of actually using the wheelbase immediately very impressed with how smooth it was overall I did find that it lacks just a little bit of detail in terms of things like Road Textures in iRacing specifically compared to the likes of the acch Sim Sports bases uh those are outstandingly good in terms of granular detail simply because there's a little bit less filtering required on uh on their system at least in my experience to to bring out those Road fing so you're not having to I guess dampen down the uh D dampen down a lot of those effects so much to bring out that detail but look having said that we are talking very very fine margins here I don't think anybody's going to be disappointed with the experience I did find that overall it was a better experience to drive with than any of the Mozza wheelbases that we've tested and I think the reason why is again down to the software integration so look there isn't a massive amount of adjustment available on Sim magic software compared to the amount of granular adjustment that you have with with the Mozza ecosystem you don't have like the The Equalizer where you can adjust frequencies and you know amplitudes at specific range things like that but honestly I didn't really feel like I needed it with this all the all the adjustments that I really felt like I needed were all there uh as I said there was a little bit of a lack of detail in Road Textures in iRacing but you know that was a very very very fine margin I think in a blind test it would be difficult to tell the difference between this and a lot of the other bases that we've had experiences with so you know certainly not a major drawback or anything like that but just you know a little tiny nitpick there but yeah overall very very good driving experience in terms of the hard quality as well you guys already know I think that the quick release that they're using here the NRG style same as what we see with the Mozza ecosystem is among the best uh in uh in terms of OEM quick releases on the market obviously now we have the fanatic qr2 which is very good as well uh asex quick release is very good too I think that the simic cube sqr is maybe a little bit dated now with the need to put that pin through it is very rigid of course but a lot of these other quick releases now are just a little bit more easy to use than what we have with the CQ sqr by comparison but yeah look overall really small footprint here as well I love the fact that they give you a ton of different mounting options here as well that is one big Advantage I think over the uh AC Tech Sim Sports bases for example you can see we've got a standard front mount B pattern here we've got bottom mount two so we've got the standard holes same as what you would find on a fanatic base there which makes it nice and easy to mount to pretty much any rig and we also have some side mounting holes here as well there are a few different mounting options available from promis in Magic and again we'll dive into all that when we get into our dedicated review of the Bas and I do also really like the fact that they put the power and USB connections on the side there's also a canbas connection and a I believe emergency stop connection there a little RJ connector and that just that means that you're able to get your monitor a little bit closer behind as well because you're not having to leave room for cables sticking out the back again look the when you when you drill into it I feel like they've put a lot of time and effort into really refining the design and you know thinking about the things that people are likely to want and making sure that they're providing those options just little details like the number of mounting options that we have here the small footprint all those kinds of things do have a positive impact on the experience of using the product overall so I think they're all very important and I think they've done a really good job with the Bas overall so that brings us to the steering wheel now as I mentioned earlier on they do have a selection of various different steering wheels available uh the FX Pro I know is something that you guys are very keen to see unfortunately I don't have it here but this is the GT pro hub with one of their leather wrapped 330 mm round steering wheels but look it's definitely uh there are some areas of improvement over the wheels that we've had from them in the past just little things like the quality of stickers I did notice that a couple of the stickers had a few little defects in the printing uh that did allow the backlight to shine through in areas where it shouldn't uh you'll see in some of the footage the pit sticker there is an example of that the sticker sheet did actually come with a few stickers kind of loose and stuck to the insides of the packaging not sure exactly what happen in there but they are nice high quality stickers overall and they do include a set of tweezers as well to make those a little bit easier to install that is one thing that has impressed me across the entire ecosystem as well I should mention is that they've included all the tools all the bits and pieces that you're likely to need to get these up and running and adjusted on your rig so that is all very good but look in terms of the quality of the wheel itself no real major complaints whatsoever about on par with what you get from Mozza for example I've got the uh rsv2 wheel here as well same quick release pretty much exactly the same shifters in fact if you hold them back to back it does look to me like they come out of the same Factory exactly the same Shi as there there are a couple of little differences there just in terms of you know the materials that they're using for carbon fiber for example uh they are both genuine carbon fiber from what I can tell but this is forged and this is your standard weave but yeah very very similar in terms of overall quality so no real reason really with these wheels in particular to choose Sim magic over Mozza or Mozza over Sim magic really I like the selection of inputs that we have here four Thumb encoders in total uh nice illumination throughout the wheel as well which you can control through the software that you'll see in a minute too good quality feeling of all the buttons for the price point I would say they are quite uh they are quite Snappy similar to what we get on a lot of cube controls wheels for example uh which admittedly are quite a lot more expensive than this wheel is but yeah certainly not the best buttons I've ever felt but perfectly adequate the shifters and analog paddles on the back are relatively good as well one thing that I have noticed on this wheel and with the uh with the mo equivalent mozzle Wheels as well is that they do have a little bit of a vibration through the wheel when you activate the shifter so you feel that reverberation through your hands that's partly just a function of the diameter of the wheel but certainly not the best feeling shifters that I've ever felt but in terms of you know being adequate for the task absolutely fine and I do like the fact that they've included some little rubber stoppers inside there that do quien those shifters down quite significantly so that is a nice little touch there again just little attention to detail things like that I think do make a difference that is actually one thing that's a little bit different from the uh from the Moz wheel that is metal to metal contact on that even though there are the same design shifters metal to metal contact there they do include some little stick on pads that you can quen that down with one nice little detail is that they do have a USBC connection on the back of the wheel which does allow you to plug this wheel into your PC directly and uh use it on other wheelbases so say for example if you had a astech Sim Sports wheelbase and you're wanting to connect that through via their integrated Hub that we looked at just recently you could do that and that would all function obviously you would still need to run the Sim magic software though on top but compared to the Mozza wheel that doesn't have that functionality so that is one little point of difference there but yeah overall I've got to say happy with the wheel overall for the price point I think it does an adequate job not really anything particularly special but it certainly does all the things that it needs to do and yeah absolutely no reason to complain about anything there I did notice that the stitching was a little bit scruffy in a few spots on this particular example uh let us know in the comments down below if you own one of these rims whether you've had a similar thing it's nothing major but just a little bit of a defect there and a few little rough edges just where some of the stitching meets but other than that I think the build quality is absolutely fine so that moves us on now to the handbrake and shifter I might just Shuffle things around a little bit here so we can get those in a little bit more detail on camera for you guys so we'll move these across now so let's start off here with the handbrake this is a brand new addition to the Sim magic ecosystem and this is a bit of a showcase product here they've really gone completely all out here with a hydraulic based system which you could argue isn't really necessary for the context of sim racing but it is very cool and uh it's quite an aggressive price point here as well considering what you're getting for the money now one thing that I do like about this as well is that you'll notice up here there are a couple of holes for mounting one of these haptic Motors so you can actually put one of these on the handbrake should you wish to do so as well and again being controllable through simhub as well as their own software uh it gives you all sorts of creative things that you can do in terms of effect to get the sensation of the back end locking up and sliding which is very cool so again a very nicely presented product CNC machined aluminium pretty much throughout here one of the things that I really appreciated about this is they do give you a couple of different mounting options so you've got through whole mounts on either side here as well as tapped threads in the bottom so if you're screwing through from a plate you can Mount that as well we mounted it on uh the next level racing plate and uh yeah it was absolutely no issue at all but if you wanted to mount it directly to a piece of profile you could do that in a linear fashion as well so again attention to detail that they've obviously thought about how people are likely to want to mount this and they're facilitating that which is absolutely great a couple of connections here on the side you'll notice there is a canbas connection which is something that we've seen throughout a lot of these different products not sure exactly what they utilize that for but that's something that will unpack more we get into into a more detailed review videos a USBC connection here for connecting through the PC and then a couple of DC Jacks here as well so if you are running the haptic motor the haptic motor plugs into the phpr port and then the power supply that comes with the haptic motor plugs into the other Port there so again pretty clean installation there and all the electronics are nicely enclosed in aluminium here to to mitigate any potential issues with electromagnetic interference in terms of the Driving Experience again very very good whether or not you need a Hy hydraulic handbrake is purely a subjective thing for me I found that it did give me a good level of control I was able to modulate my input look I'm not a massively experienced rally driver or anything like that so I'm probably not the best person in the world to be commenting on it but I did find that it gave me a really good sensation at that threshold Point similar to what I talk about with brakes a lot of the time you can you can hit that threshold Point very accurately and then modulate around that so when I was sliding the car around corners in dirt rally if I found that my angle wasn't quite enough I could modulate pull the brake a little bit more get a little bit more angle and then release it to straighten the car up and I did find that it made me quicker overall compared to some of the other handbrakes that we've tested now there are some really good load cell handbrakes out there which give a very similar experience but if you're comparing this to something like Fanatics handbrake for example it is absolutely chalk and cheese that is much more kind of just a you know you just don't get a good sensation of where you are in the throw which makes it a lot more difficult to modulate and really control the slip angle of the car whereas this does give you a lot of feeling very very nicely presented in terms of how all the Hydraulics work as well so you can see there's a little fluid reservoir on this side and then you've got your elasta stack in this side which is what actually compresses with the piston and then the cylinder itself is all nicely integrated here so there's no hoses or anything like that that can balloon out and all of those things do add to the overall sensation and yeah just give it a really nice high quality feel overall so yeah I'm not the most experienced person in the world when it comes to using a handbrake but I can certainly appreciate the qualities here that I think those who are more experienced will uh will find beneficial let's just say the only complaint that I have here is I'm just not sure that the material Choice here is going to have a lot of longevity it's kind of like a foam material and uh yeah I I can imagine accidentally picking at it when I'm sitting in the rig or you know it's it's going to flake pretty easily I think I mean obviously we haven't put this through a massive amount of usage yet so we don't know how it's going to stand up to the test of time but yeah just not convinced that it's the best material Choice uh that they could have made but it does have a nice feel to it just longevity wise I'm not 100% convinced but otherwise very very very high quality and absolutely nothing to complain about whatsoever so let's move on to the shifter now and again look it's it's been a very very positive experience I compared this across to the experience with Fanatics AG patent shifter which has been a bit of a Mainstay in Sim Racing for a long time now for the simple fact that it allows you to easily transition between sequential and H patent modes this also provides that same functionality and look honestly ly I think this does a better job than the fanatic shifter does it's a smaller footprint immediately which a lot of people are going to appreciate now in comparing with the fanatic shifter of course you do need to consider this is a lot more expensive than that is and I do still think that the fanatic shifter does a good job for the price point but this is definitely in a completely different class very very high quality build as well you can see nice thick material everywhere it is all aluminium construction plenty of mounting pattern options down the bottom here as well through hole on the sides here so you can mount it on a piece of profile from the top as well as threaded holes here again on the bottom so you can mount it through a plate like what we saw with the next level racing one earlier very very easy to change between H patent and sequential modes too so all you need to do is just flick that little switch that puts it into sequential and then back up again for H patent mode and look a very very good feel overall as well it doesn't quite give you the sensation of mechanical connection inside the car like something like your bd8 shifter would for example but obviously this is a lot cheaper than something like that is so it's not really a fair comparison but it does have a nice mechanical click in each position it does have a really good feel overall and I really like that they've integrated a real life kind of lockout system here so the fanatic shift you kind of push down to put into seventh gear or reverse and it can be quite clumsy to do so just doesn't have a fantastic feeling to it overall whereas this you pull up the collar here to go into reverse or into seventh and eighth gear so the standard six gear H Pat all happens without having to do anything with the collar but to get into 7th eth and reverse you pull the collar it's got a really nice high quality either Teflon or delin some sort of material like that shift knob pretty much in fact the same as what we have on the bdh shifter which we're in the process of testing at the moment which I believe is actually a qua knob that they uh that they source to put on those shifters so yeah absolutely nothing to nitpick or complain about at all with this shifter I think it does a really really fantastic job ease of use quality of build feeling overall for the price point of as well easy to mount easy to use in the software as well yeah I think they've absolutely nailed the shifter so that covers the basic experience of using all of these products and yeah look it it has been a really impressive experience overall definitely come in Leaps and Bounds since we uh since we originally looked at Sim magic a couple of years ago now and I'm I'm really happy to see that they have improved so many aspects of the experience overall now one of the big complaints that we had in the past with Sim magic was the experience in the software side of things that's where I felt it really kind of let things down so what I want to do now is take you guys over we'll jump onto the simig and just take you through at a top level what the experience is like using their software as it stands here now in the latter half of 2023 but before we do that just quickly want to also ask you guys a favor if you're finding what we're doing so far helpful please do consider subscribing to the channel only about 30% of the people that watch these videos are actually subscribed to the channel now I know that it doesn't have a big impact on what you see in your newsfeed these days but where it does have a big impact is in showing YouTube that this content is useful to uh to feed it out to other SIM Racers that might find it beneficial so if you're finding what we're doing here today beneficial to you please do help us by subscribing to the channel it's a small thing that you can do that really does have a very big impact and helps us a lot but let's jump over on to the rig now okay so a quick look through the Sim proo manager software from SIM magic now if you cast your mind back to when we originally looked at Sim magic many years ago now one of the big issues that I had just with the overall user experience uh completely aside from the hardware was just that the software was quite clunky uh quite primitive I would say at the time quite a few glitches things like that one of the big problems that we had early on was uh firmware updates not taking properly and you know Communications channels getting mixed up so the wheel wouldn't communicate with the base things like that straight off the bat here I need to call out the fact that the experience has been pretty much completely seamless here as you can see we've got the wheelbase we've got the wheel we've got the shifter we've got the handbrake we've got the the pedals we've got the haptic Motors we've got the light bars we got everything pretty much that you would need in an entire ecosystem if you were to choose everything from the one brand and honestly everything plugged in it just worked there was no stuffing around whatsoever everything was pretty much absolutely perfect out of the box which really surprised me having come from that experience previously so that tells me straight away that they've put a lot of work and effort into just overall improving that user experience right from the moment you unbox and plug into your PC which is absolutely fantastic to see the only exception to that was that at this point in time I haven't been able to get automobilista 2 to recognize the Bas properly and give me forc feedback I'm sure it's something that I'm doing wrong I just haven't had the time to investigate that properly yet but of course when we come back to do our proper review of the uh wheelbase we'll address that properly and make sure that we're not making any mistakes there remember again this is just a first impressions video so there may be some things that I'm not quite getting right and uh you know we'll obviously sort those things out before we get into full reviews but anyway jumping into the software now straight away the presentation of this is quite a lot cleaner and you know more intuitive than what we had previously as well so similar to what we're seeing from a lot of Manufacturers now you get the uh you get the list of devices along the bottom here that shows you what you've got connected within their ecosystem so you can see the Basse the pedals the uh the wheel plate the shifter and the handbrake all highlighted down the bottom here if we just quickly go back to the home screen you can see a selection of different games so if we click on these individual games we'll start off here with a setto corser there will at some point in the future by the looks of things here be some uh pre-cooked presets that you can load in directly from this screen there's also a guide here for setting up your force feedback I did run through that for automobilist 2 and unfortunately it didn't work so I'll just clarify that quickly for you guys but you can see all very cleanly presented here very clear and concise instructions uh instructions here for Telemetry support as well uh to let you know what's working and what's not so very very complete here I'm I'm really happy with what I'm seeing uh one thing I did notice is that there are some pre-cooked profiles if you go down under devices for some of the peripherals so for example for our base we can see a nice selection of uh pretty much all the major titles that I think people are likely to be playing here so set of cors competicion automobilista 2 and so forth and those profiles actually feel pretty good we've tested so far briefly in iRacing ACC automobile 2 as I mentioned had a few issues uh dirt rally 2 felt pretty good as well maybe lacking a little bit in Road texture but again I haven't played around with the settings a lot just yet so uh we'll Reserve Final Judgement on that until we get into a proper review of the wheelbase but yeah I mean you can see here from a from a standpoint of completeness there's plenty of stuff here to get you up and running as a baseline which you can then tweak and adjust uh as you get through so as we mentioned you got tabs for each of the peripherals here so it's nice and clean everything is sort of integrated into one software package so you're not having to run multiple software packages from multiple different peripherals and that's something that I think is uh really starting to develop in Sim racing in general at the moment we're seeing a lot of companies come out with complete ecosystems like this that you to keep everything within the one brand and keep everything a lot cleaner that's one of the frustrations that I have on my daily driver Sim rig and have done since we built that is we've got so many different brands of hardware on there you've got to have so many different software packages it just creates a lot of confusion and it also does have an increased parasitic load on the PC too because it's having to run a lot of software packages rather than just the one so seeing it nicely integrated like this is something that I think is really great and you can see here all the standard adjustments that you would expect for your force feedback details and they do have clear and concise written tool tips for each of these settings too that explain exactly what they do and what impact they have on what you're feeling through your hands which is of course very important so you just kind of feel like you have got your back all the way through this process you don't you're not feeling overwhelmed and uh yeah it's just it's just nice and approachable and very well put together I would say so if we click across to pedals as well standard kind of settings that you would expect for a set of pedals so when we push on the pedals you can see the response we can set up nonlinear response curves as well if we want to and then we also have these little tabs here for feedback too so if we click on the feedback tab you can see our adjustment for our frequency and our overall amplitude or strength for each of the vibration Motors we can also click on those Motors too and I can feel that quite nicely through the brake there when I click on that that allows me to have a realtime way of adjusting these force feedback effects but again we'll dive into this in more detail when we get up and do our review of the pedals a little bit later on but you can see down here there is a little bit of garbled text in the previous version of the software that I was running which is the current full release software this was all absolutely fine this new version that we're running here is a beta version to give us compatibility with the handbrake and that appears to be a bug that's in that software but I'm confident that shouldn't be an issue for most people but you can see here we've got haptic feedback effects for all the major things that you would expect uh from clutch input to ABS traction control and so forth now they aren't all compatible with every single title I believe iRacing is only compatible with the ABS effect for now but a set of course a competiion does work with all the effects from what I understand but again we'll unpack that when we review the pedals properly later on so then you may also notice the light tab up the top here too now there's a ton of stuff that we can do in here but just to quickly give you the overview for the pedals you got two separate LED bars which are available for these pedals the one that you can see clearly above the top and then also one underneath which is a little bit difficult to see on this particular rig but if you wear up against a hard flat surface underneath you would see this quite clearly so what we can do here is we can have a single color for each of the individual bars so we've got our simray bar which is underneath and then our simray heel stop which is this part here so we can have a single color which responds to ABS or traction control inputs on either so you can have it pulsing with the ABS along with the haptic feedback a bit of a gimmick there I would say not something that you're likely to be paying attention to because your eyes aren't looking at your pedals when you're driving but a cool effect nonetheless you've got a breathing effect for both of these as well which kind of pulses in and out as you can see here and we can adjust the speed the brightness and of course the color down the bottom we got a color cycle setting here too which allows to cycle through various different colors pretty self-explanatory and then this one is pretty interesting so there's also a pedal follow mode so what you'll notice here is we've got a setting for throttle or breake and what we can do is we can actually have that uh light bar follow the input there so you can see clearly on the keep racing logo there that goes across so again not not something that I think is particularly useful because your eyes aren't going to be looking at the pedals when you're driving of course but it's a cool thing nonetheless uh wheel button plate as well you can see all the standard settings you would expect once once again we've got calibration for our clutch paddles we've got the ability to make adjustments to our lighting Telemetry based adjustments here as well and then we go across to our shifter you can see at the moment I've got it in h pattern mode so we shift into first second and you can see it just highlights through we got the little switch on the side as you guys saw earlier on that allows us to switch into sequential mode very very nice and simple no tools required at all to make that adjustment which is very very nice to see and likewise with our handbrake as well again we can set a nonlinear response just like what we can do with the pedals if you wish to do so uh we do have the option for haptic feedback on the handbrake too which is something we'll experiment with when we get into the review of that guy and uh yeah look just a really really well presented piece of software overall I would say right up there with the best in terms of you know ease of use uh completeness and just general presentation I would say so yeah I think they've done a really good job here now if we just quickly jump down to the settings tab here as well you'll see there is the option here to update the software I like the way they've integrated this as well so you can see whether your software is up to date or not at a glance here whether there's an update available you can just update it right here within the software you'll notice down the bottom here there is a button for manually updating a firmware if you're wanting to flash a file that they might send you or some sort of experimental firmware or something like that um but one thing that I did really appreciate too was when I first plugged everything in when I clicked on each of these devices it would pop up and it would say that there's a firmware update available all I had to do is just click update and it literally just flashed it rebooted itself and it was good to go straight away there was no stuffing around whatsoever just with the exception of the handbrake which did take a couple of goes to get right but again it is beater software for compatibility with the handbrake so again I would imagine that that should hopefully be resolved by the time that goes for release but yeah otherwise very very seamless very very easy to use and uh a good experience overall which is in St contrast to the experience we had a couple of years ago with Sim magic which as I said was quite clumsy and convoluted so yeah big improvements there and right up there I would say with the best of the best when it comes to all the things things that I think are important at least in a software package so to wrap things up guys in terms of a initial impression here I've got to say really impressed overall from the quality of the build of the hardware just the refinement the ease of use the you just little attention to detail things like mounting is really easy uh upgradability modularity of the pedals was really fantastic as well and uh yeah look just overall a really great experience I mean it has been quite some time since we looked at Sim magic but they've definitely made some very significant improvements from software all the way through to hardware and yeah I just I'm really really impressed as I'm sure you can tell from today's video so I'm really looking forward to diving into each of these products in more detail and unpacking them giving you all the details and breakdown on each one but I think as a as a complete ecosystem they've really done a fantastic job there's really nothing to complain about overall everything integrates really nicely very seamless experience overall there are a couple of little tiny glitches with a couple of games getting things up and running but so all pretty easily solvable just through their Discord community and uh yeah nothing major to complain about whatsoever so stay tuned for the full breakdown and reviews on all of these individual products as we'll going through them over the next couple of months if you do decide you want to pick up any of the gear that we've talked about in today's video there will be some links down in the description below uh to some of our reseller Partners so that's an awesome way of helping support our work here at boosted media at no additional cost if you do want to help support us if you find what we do valuable but uh yeah above all guys thank you very much for watching as always and I think that's it for today's video so if you've got any questions let us know down below definitely hit us up in the comments if you got anything specific that you'd like us to cover on any one of these individual products and yeah we'll see you again very soon bye

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 51,636

Keywords: Simagic, P1000, Alpha Mini, Direct Drive, Best SIm Racing rig, Best Sim Racing Wheel, Simagic vs Fanatec, Simagic vs Moza, Simagic vs Asetek, Simagic vs Logitech

Id: 0WH4TKI5KG4

Length: 38min 37sec (2317 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023