Descent 3 Force Feedback on W98SE

[murrayman]

Hey all, been crawling the forum since the early days and finally decided to register cause I've got an issue for which I can't seem to find an answer via search.

I've got Descent 3 v1.5 beta installed on both my Win98SE machines (see sig), and I've got a Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro that works perfectly with Freespace, Freespace 2, and other games. 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, so no issues there. I saw one thread that mentioned this issue under Vista back in 2008, but nothing else of the kind, especially for native OS.

Anyone know of a fix?

[murrayman]

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.