Using non-"chipped" cars on digital track

Ok - how does that work???

These cars are sending AC square waves (not evenly distributed squares), the motor wired directly to the braid will send all this to the coils in the motor. At best they will respond to the difference of 1s and zeros, but will the AC damage the motors?

Thats how I imagined it would work, since RC45 has it operating on his system, obviously something else is happening?

ahh ok - heres my guess:

for the 00 channel (analogue cars), it adds some extra zeros or ones that are not part of a 'message' to one of the other cars, so that the average voltage (of the ones and zeros of the proper messages plus these extra ones) ends up being say +6 volts (or whatever the controller for car 00 is set to).

Again there is a question of whether this would damage the motor & LED lights long-term - i have no idea on this issue

bbloye - much has been speculated on these boards already.

You are right about sport world using the digital controllers to run analogue cars.

The World system has a removeable control pod.

Later Scalextric are releasing DIgital Pro system, using a removeable pod, so you can switch between the digital pod and the world pod (if you have purchased both!)

Regarding the digital protocol - a similar method as used for DCC seems likely (+18volts/-18volts square waves, with pulse widths representing the data) rather than a superimposed digital signal. This is because the communication transmission is very noisy and adverse to complex signals; when rectified, it results in a constant voltage to all the digital cars. And the bonus is that non-signal data can be added between the data packets so that the summed volyage can be varied from 0 volts to something useful (12 volts?) for an analogue car/train