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MS Sidewinder Precision Wheel USB 1.1 in Windows 98SE

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First post, by badconduct

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I cannot figure out how to get this wheel working, I'm having a hell of a time fighting with gameports and Soundcards...

I had an Sound Blaster Live! Value, the gameport would work, the USB Wheel would work, but the sound wouldn't. If I tried to format the PC with this card in, I'd get a disk write error and it would crash the installer.

I got a Opti 16 BCM card in the IDA slot now. Joystick and audio work fine, but it will not detect the wheel at all. Using the Side Winder 4.0 package specifically for this wheel on Windows 98SE.

What is going on here?
Is the gameport driver required for USB controllers, and in that case, is this card too old?

edit: going to plug in the value and see if the gameport installation fixes the wheel.

edit 2: nope, game port installed, but wouldn't detect anything plugged in and didn't detect the USB wheel

Reply 1 of 4, by chiveicrook

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I used to have this wheel and it came with dedicated usb drivers as far as I remember, drivers and utilities for gameport models wouldn't work with it. However, I think even W98SE should pick it up as a generic joystick when connected (with totally wrong mappings obviously).
Sound card problems are unrelated, most likely resource conflicts / bus mastering problem with SB Live Value.

Reply 2 of 4, by badconduct

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chiveicrook wrote on 2022-03-21, 07:14:

I used to have this wheel and it came with dedicated usb drivers as far as I remember, drivers and utilities for gameport models wouldn't work with it. However, I think even W98SE should pick it up as a generic joystick when connected (with totally wrong mappings obviously).
Sound card problems are unrelated, most likely resource conflicts / bus mastering problem with SB Live Value.

I tried plugging it into my main win 11 pc and nothing showed up. Tried on a windows 10 laptop and still nothing.

I did install the correct software. I know for certain, because it did work at one point but the sound didn’t and it would crash when I’d launch a game.

I’ve tried everything I can think of. I’ve reinstalled 98 like 5 times this weekend with 4 different soundcards that gave 4 different results. There’s no resource conflicts detected in the system devices.
Is there a version of msinfo on 98?

Maybe my motherboard is bad…? And that’s why I’m getting these weird issues.
Sound cards shouldn’t be this difficult to get working. USB devices should also just work when you connect them.

Reply 3 of 4, by badconduct

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Alright, after who knows what, I plugged it in and it asked for the CD, but installed the wrong driver. So I uninstalled it, removed the shortcut and registry entries with ccleaner2, then installed the sidewinder 4.0 software, plugged it in and it worked!

Reply 4 of 4, by badconduct

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I reinstalled Windows 98SE recently, I was getting some crazy crashing.

Anyway, I reinstalled the Percision Wheel and Percision Pro and this is the steps I had to follow

Plug both in.
Install the Sidewinder Wheel V4 software first, but it won't detect on USB 1.1 or gameport however.
Install the Sidewinder Percision Pro V3 software, when it asks to write over files, say "yes"
Reboot
The V3 will detect both controllers now, you need both installed.

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