The Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick is still a very well regarded device to this day, as LGR demonstrates in his recent video.

It’s a device I would have loved to have owned and experienced back in the day, but at the time I didn’t have an income that would have made that possible. So it’s a real delight being able to pick up such a item now.

I picked mine up on eBay without any of software or the power adapter. However such things can easily be purchased separately or in the case of the software replicated on a classy looking CD-R.

My Packard Bell with it’s 200MHz Pentium processor seemed like a good place to start so I went ahead and installed the software.

Unfortunately although the joystick was detected, when I tested it in the control panel it didn’t seem to detect movements smoothly. Worse still the various force feedback demonstrations didn’t work! Was my joystick broken?

I decided to double down and ordered a Force Feedback 2 joystick, which is slightly smaller whilst also using a USB interface over the originals gameport connector.

However this newer joystick didn’t want to play ball with my Athlon XP based system. What is going on? Have I just bought two broken joysticks?

I also decided to try the original joystick on my slightly more powerful Pentium III 600MHz machine. Perhaps the slower CPU just didn’t have enough grunt, even though it met the minimum specs for using the device.

Finally I was rewarded with the behaviour I’d expect from the device. The demos worked and when I tried it in games it also worked perfectly.

Freespace 2 with force feedback? Wow, I’d waited a long time to experience that.

Recommended!