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Descent 3 + Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro = No force feedback?

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First post, by murrayman

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I've got Descent 3 v1.5 beta installed on all of my systems, and I've got a Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro that works perfectly with Freespace, Freespace 2, and other games on each rig. But for the life of me, I cannot seem to get D3's setup program to allow me to check the force feedback function despite it recognizing the joystick properly. I'm using SW 4.0 software for the joystick under Win95 and Win98SE, so no issues there. Tried giving Win2K a shot with its native joystick drivers, but no luck there either. I saw one thread elsewhere that mentioned this issue under Vista back in 2008, but no fix and nothing else of the kind, especially for native OS.

Anyone know of a fix? Or a force-feedback joystick that's confirmed to work with D3? I did own a Logitech Wingman Force 3D for a number of years before the potentiometers all bit the dust, and I recall it too didn't work with D3.

P3B-F 1.04, PIII 1k, 512MB PC133, GF DDR 32MB + DM3DII 12MB SLI, SB0100
P3B-F 1.03, PIII 700, 384MB PC100, V5 AGP, SB0160
CP 5170, PII 350, 256MB PC100, Rage LT 2MB, ESS 1869
PB M S610, PMMX 233, 128MB EDO66, DM3D 4MB, Aztech

Reply 1 of 2, by murrayman

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Posting this for mine and anyone else's future reference, especially those like me who are bad about not sleuthing:

- Run the D3 setup utility
- Make sure it has detected the correct joystick, but ignore the force feedback check box in the setup utility - it will likely be greyed out
- Continue on into the game
- From either the main menu or in a level, go to options > config, to edit controller function
- Select joy/mouse, then at the top, click on adjust settings
- You should see a section dedicated to force feedback on the bottom-right. Click on force feedback enabled, then set the force gain to anything above 0% - I ran mine at 50%
- You should now have working force feedback!

In the event you still have driver-level issues, that force feedback section in the controller config screen simply won't exist - for example, when I started the game with my Sidewinder gamepad, there was nothing there at all.

P3B-F 1.04, PIII 1k, 512MB PC133, GF DDR 32MB + DM3DII 12MB SLI, SB0100
P3B-F 1.03, PIII 700, 384MB PC100, V5 AGP, SB0160
CP 5170, PII 350, 256MB PC100, Rage LT 2MB, ESS 1869
PB M S610, PMMX 233, 128MB EDO66, DM3D 4MB, Aztech

Reply 2 of 2, by Davros

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try version 3.0 of the sidewinder software if it works install 4.0 over it

Guardian of the Sacred Five Terabyte's of Gaming Goodness

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