[Cyker]

Here's a nice obscure query

My Sidewinder to USB converter arrived today, and works brilliantly in Win2k, XP, and Linux, but not in 98!

As far as I can tell, the problem seems to be this:
The converter produces raw values from -512 to 512, but Windows '98 doesn't seem to support negative numbers and caps the interpreted values at 0,0 until the axis in question goes past the half-way mark, at which point it outputs sane values again right up to 65535,65535 (Bottom Right).

Does anyone know if there were ever any updated joystick drivers for Win98 (I'm assuming that's VJOYD.VXD (Mine is v4.08.01.0881), JOYHID.VXD (4.88.01.0881) and MSJSTICK.DRV (v4.08.01.0881)) that didn't have this limitation?

All the other OS' auto-calibrate on the given raw values and it seems silly that '98 can't, especially since the interpreted values can range from -65535 to +65535!

[rloew]

Cyker, on 25 August 2010 - 11:40 AM, said:

Here's a nice obscure query

My Sidewinder to USB converter arrived today, and works brilliantly in Win2k, XP, and Linux, but not in 98!

As far as I can tell, the problem seems to be this:
The converter produces raw values from -512 to 512, but Windows '98 doesn't seem to support negative numbers and caps the interpreted values at 0,0 until the axis in question goes past the half-way mark, at which point it outputs sane values again right up to 65535,65535 (Bottom Right).

Does anyone know if there were ever any updated joystick drivers for Win98 (I'm assuming that's VJOYD.VXD (Mine is v4.08.01.0881), JOYHID.VXD (4.88.01.0881) and MSJSTICK.DRV (v4.08.01.0881)) that didn't have this limitation?

All the other OS' auto-calibrate on the given raw values and it seems silly that '98 can't, especially since the interpreted values can range from -65535 to +65535!

The problem probably was discovered and fixed in the later OSes. Check for any newer updates and if none, try any newer ME Versions if there are any.
If the ME Versions don't load, they can be probably be Patched. These three files are part of DirectX.

This post has been edited by rloew: 25 August 2010 - 04:22 PM

[Cyker]

Thanks for the reply rloew

We managed to fix it from the other direction in the end; Because the controller uses a Teensy 2.0, Grendel over at descentbb.net was able to modify his firmware code to work around Win98's limit. I just uploaded the new code to the Teensy and it works!

Right, I think I'm going to have a few games of MechWarrior 3 the way it was meant to be! (Without the disappearing turrets and bouncing APCs that you get if you run it in 2K or XP! )