... I tried 3 lvds boards and they all went died within ~10 minutes of powering up so I've got a partially assembled one sitting off to the side that I haven't been able to use ...
Did you use the same AC adapter on all 3 boards? On my diy rift (5.6 inch screen, HDMI and VGA board), I was originally using a brick-style AC adapter with the output as 12V 4A max, but some of the components were getting really hot, so I switched it to a PowerLine Universal AC Adapter set to 9V 600mA.
All the tracking including yaw are one to one, but given that you're the first person to use the vireio drivers here's a likely reason. Vireio provides mouse emulation from what I've read, and if that's not disabled somehow your essentially getting the real head tracking yaw updates + the mouse emulation ones. I do allow mouse input to turn the player as well as the gamepad right stick so you can turn around without physically turning in circles. I don't know if vireio has an option to shut off mouse emulation but if not I can add a switch to turn off mouse input.
I had vireio's tracking disabled. With the 250hz hillcrest, all tracking was 2:1. And when looking 90 degrees up or down, the camera would slowly drift back to the horizon. I've since downgraded the firmware back to stock 125hz, and now all tracking is 1:1 and working normally.
I'm surprised that the 250hz firmware was working for you, it caused issues for djdevin but I had planned to add proper support for it this weekend.
Can't wait to try it.
I've been playing a lot of Doom 3 BFG with tmek's tracking code. But the entire game is dark bloody corridors and hell themed levels. And no one's written a guide on how to load custom maps on it.
Most of the hl2 maps that I've found on gamebanana have worked very well with hl2vr. Buggy/jeep maps are really fun (and kinda nauseating when the buggy flips over) because the cockpit view and the head tracking is independent from the vehicle direction. There's a small problem though when accelerating in the buggy, the camera view gets auto "corrected" to face forward, even if my intention is to look outside the driver side window.
I also spent time noclipping around a minecraft themed map, which is really interesting because it gives me an idea of what VR minecraft can potentially look like.