[jazzy intro music]
[computer buzzes, beeps] - Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing about something that I
feel like talking about because I feel like it. And that is this right here, the lovely Microsoft
SideWinder Force Feedback Pro from 1997. And it has long been one
of my favorite joysticks and in my opinion, it's still
one of the best to this day, on the right setup. And with the force
feedback nature of this, what this can do is still pretty special. So let's take a look at it. Yes, "Push reality
beyond sight and sound." By the time this particular
bundle was released, it was, indeed, the number-one-selling force feedback joystick, not that there was much competition. "First there was sight. Then there was sound. Then Microsoft revolutionized
the gaming industry with dynamic force feedback technology and earned PC Gamer's
Editor's Choice Award." Indeed they did. Beginning with the SideWinder
Force Feedback Wheel and Force Feedback Pro
Joystick following soon after, eh, pretty much around the same time, from what I remember
seeing in stores, anyway. And on that note, this thing
cost $159.99 US in 1997, when it initially launched. Or around $300, 26 years
later adjusted for inflation. Of course, being the late '90s,
mail-in rebates were common, both in the store with the
retailer you bought it from, and also just in the box. Like with mine here, which
came with a $30 mail-in rebate. And I do remember specifically
seeing this for sale at the CompUSA in Greensboro,
North Carolina back then. They had this awesome
in-store display unit with the joystick set up and a computer that you
could just press the buttons and it would do different things, sort of mimicking different scenes that you might get in different games and you could see what all the
force feedback effects were. And there were a bunch of 'em. I think 12 different
types of feedback effects were directly supported with
the DirectX DirectInput API. But of course, game programmers could make use of all these effects, and mix 'em up and do all
sorts of fascinating things to create intriguing forces. And yeah, that CompUSA demo
really stood out in my mind. And I was super excited to find
this particular boxed example on Thrifts some years back in Greensboro. And, in fact, this actually has a CompUSA
sticker right there, with January 5th, '99 as
a date code, I suppose. And yeah, this is very much
likely one of the things that came from that exact
Greensboro CompUSA store that I first saw this demoed. [laughs] It's just, I don't know.
I was so excited to see that, like, all these things came
together decades later. And now here we are even more years later, and I'm really excited
to take a look at it. So let's go ahead and unbox this sucker. So like I said, I found this thrifting so I don't know if it's a
hundred percent complete, but whatever. [chill piano music, general unboxing sounds] So, first up is the stick itself. A substantial thing indeed
it weighs... this much. Pretty hefty for a joystick of the time and pretty good materials too,
as Microsoft often went with with their SideWinder products. So going from bottom to top
here we have a shift button which changes the
function of each of these. It shifts between different layers. We have a little half
sphere throttle right there and our four action buttons right here, a little hat and four
more buttons up at the top with the fourth one being the trigger. So there are eight buttons in total, really becoming 16 with the
use of the shift button. Also have this nice rubbery
sort of gear lever-esque sleeve around the bottom of
the stick right there. All the motors are inside
this thickness. This right here always looked kind of like it would be a fan
opening or something to me, but it's covered up. Not really much to see along
the bottom, but there it is. And then it connects to your
PC using the 15-pin gameport. And then you have this
and that is for power. So yeah, this thing has its own separate wall wart power supply brick. It is a unit. A 12 volt, 1.3 amp, 30 watt power supply. You do get some software of course, with the SideWinder program and drivers and all that right there. And in this particular pack
you get the full version of "Urban Assault." Others before this often
came with Interstate '76. And of course, some paperwork. This ad here for "High-end
home audio, now on your PC." A pretty neat looking speaker
system from Microsoft there. Digital Sound System 80,
anybody ever have one of these? I've never heard one. Let's see, Microsoft Gaming Zone and this Fighter Ace thing
that you could play online. A survival card, really
just a quick reference for "Urban Assault." Nice to have cuz it's
kind of a complicated game, if you can tell by looking at that. And a getting started guide for the Force Feedback
SideWinders of the time, which there's not much in here really. It's just like here's how to connect and plug things in and mount stuff. It really just kind of goes
over the steering wheel. Doesn't really show much of
anything about the joystick, but honestly you don't do
anything really different except you're not mounting it to a desk. Although I kind of wish you
could and we'll see why. And of course in a moment we're
going to set this thing up with an era-appropriate
computer and some games and the software and
stuff that it came with. And really put this through its paces, and try out all those awesome
force feedback effects. But you know, I realize that these aren't really
so much of a thing anymore. So just to clarify, force feedback is distinct and different
from just straight-up rumble or tactile feedback, or haptic
feedback or any of that. This right here relies on
motorized motion and resistance physically pushing the controller
around against your hand. So you really have to
fight it, so to speak. You feel this thing pushing against whatever you're trying to
do and imitating G-forces, and gunfire, and explosions, and rockets and it's just a more
immersive and "hardcore" I guess you could say, experience. As opposed to something
that just kind of rumbles. And it does this by using two
pretty beefy motors inside. I'm not gonna take mine all
apart, it's a bit of a thing. But yeah, you can see in this video by heliflyer7 there are these big motors and a series of girthy lubricated gears that really make this
thing pretty powerful when plugged into the wall. It has a 15-pin gameport adapter here. You just plug this into your
joystick / MIDI port on your sound card, typically. But you also have right here a place to plug in that AC adapter providing 12 volts at 1.3 amps. And it's then that everything kicks in and you know, you can still
feel the motors and gears and whatnot just doing this. Just sort of, eh, it
doesn't really auto center or anything until there's power. But when it kicks in,
you know it kicks in. And the nice thing about
the way that this works is it doesn't rely on potentiometers as so many joysticks do, did. This has a digital optical
sensor solution in there using infrared and optics to digitally get the controls across. Which means that you don't have
that potentiometer weirdness or gunking up or anything, but you also don't have to
worry about calibration at all 'cause it just is what it is,
and it works extremely well with very high precision. Something Microsoft was
bragging about constantly in the marketing on the box. 16-bit processor with its
own RAM, just for all that. "Patented digital optical technology." Yeah, it's just highly
precise and lovely to use. So let's go back to the late '90s, and plug this thing into both
the wall and the computer. Set it up with the stuff that
it came with and more things, and yeah, let's try out
this lovely joystick. [jazz music fades] All right, it's all plugged in to the Megaluminum Monster,
plugged into the wall. And it's already providing
a little bit of resistance. You can feel the motors
just lightly pushing against when you do that, but
yeah, it is all installed. Finally! This has taken, no joke, about three and a half hours
to get this software going. Oh man, you know,
there was a whole thing where it's like,
it installed in Windows 98, which is what the Megaluminum
Monster normally is, and the drivers and everything were fine, but the games wouldn't work. Like Urban Assault and
some of the other things that were specifically
built to work with it that came with the joystick. So then I moved over to
Windows 95 on the same machine and the games would work, but the joystick was
completely unrecognized. Now I didn't get any footage of this,
cuz honestly I was so frustrated I didn't want the camera on. But yeah, it turns out
the AWE64 Gold sound card that I have in there, this was
plugged into that gameport and it was fine on 98, but on 95, the drivers from Creative don't like this,
or the gameport, it can't read it, and it saw it only as a regular
gamepad. And it came with some driver fixes on here but those didn't work, it still just saw it in
increasingly odd ways. So I had to switch over to
plug this into the Vortex 2 and yeah, now it sees
it correctly right here, over this one. Anyway,
now that we're in here we can see that wonderful precision of those optical sensors in there instead of the potentiometers. It's really quite fantastic and there is no way to
actually do any calibration or anything like that
'cause it doesn't need it. So yeah, you can just, you know, test it and see that it's working
and of course it is. It also installed this
SideWinder software here. So it pops this thing
up SideWinder Central and yeah that brings up a control panel and some read-mes and whatnot. But this right here, this includes profiles
for a number of games. You can create your own, but it does come with
a whole bunch of them. A lot of good stuff in here. And even some things that
you might not expect, like hey "Duke Nukem 3D" is right there, which is a DOS game that does
not support force feedback, so what's up with that? Well it's a keyboard mapper, like a keyboard to
joystick remapping program. So mapped joystick button
2 to A, 3 to space, 4 to strafe and so on. Also lets you program
macros for multiple movements and things like that, and
program the shift button to do different combinations of buttons. But you can't just go around
adding force feedback support to games that don't support it. Unfortunately. I wish that was the case! But that's not what this does. This is just a thing
that lets you set it up for different games that
may not support a joystick or this joystick in particular. So for instance, MS-DOS
emulation is enabled for Duke 3D is treating it as just a
generic Thrustmaster joystick. And you can adjust the dead zone and what the twisting
does, stuff like that. But back into the control panel though, and this is where things get pretty fun. So you can change the
force feedback effects to off or all the way up. Yeah, let's make it high and rigid. And now this right here, I
love this, check this out. [joystick vibrating] [laughing] [joystick vibrating more] Yeah, you can mess around
with all the different types of effects that it's capable of doing. So, machine gun. [joystick vibrating] A diesel engine idling, [joystick puttering] a plasma fire [joystick clicks] [laughs] car engine idling, that's a
diesel, again, there's the car. Yeah, it's a light little,
[imitates puttering] plasma cannon or just, you know, whatever, it's approximating what it
thinks might be like that in a game, I quite like its
interpretation of jumping, which pushes it forward like that and landing, ugh pushes you back. And if you hold down
shift you get even more so cannons, shotgun, nice. Those are pretty similar actually. Just pushing back and back
and back, getting that recoil. Lightning gun. [joystick vibrates] Gatling gun. [joystick gatlates] Pretty light actually. Plasma cannon, and let's see here. Wind shear. [joystick vibrates shearingly] Yeah that's neat. Torpedo, very light as
well and rocket launcher. Yeah that's that's an interesting one. Yeah if you don't really
hold onto it, yeah. Like it'll push back. Oh yeah, that's just awesome. I love this little demo program. And this is pretty similar to what I first experienced with this [joystick vibrating] back at CompUSA back in the day. I don't-- [laughs] I don't remember if this
is exactly, it was this, I seem to remember there
being like some visuals that went along with it, more
UI elements or something, but maybe it was just this. So you can really see the kind of forces you're getting here. This thing is intense, especially on the higher
settings like this, but really, I mean even
on the lower settings it's kind of cool. [joystick rattling] Like that's low. [joystick rattles still] It's still a thing. That's also why I have
it on this pad here. On its own, there is not
nearly enough grippage to keep it in place. Like this thing is gonna
fly all over the dang table whenever you're in a game,
so let's get to a game. And we gotta start with
the one that it came with, in this particular pack: Urban Assault. [Microsoft intro music] I'm so glad to see this running. It was like an hour just
getting to this point. And then I was trying to get
all your other games working, and then 3D acceleration
wasn't working with Windows 95 'cause I had a Voodoo 3 in
here and I had to upgrade it to DirectX seven point
something, and oh my goodness. Anyway, we're finally
here, the input settings, force feedback is enabled. And that's all it needs cuz
this game is by Microsoft, it knows what to do straight away. So we're gonna play just one
of the training missions. Let's do one with different
types of vehicles. And if you're not familiar with this game, it's actually pretty awesome. It's kind of a mixture
of real time strategy and I guess first person
vehicle combat, sort of. - [Computer] All station systems online. - Right, so basically you can– - [Computer] Destroy any
target seen on the map. - She might get a little annoying... Lemme turn it down here. So basically you can
look around here in 3D at what's going on, or you can
just click around on the map and do different things. So the objective in this one here is to destroy these three red objects and we'll just spawn some
vehicles on the ground, and then what we can do is jump into them. And now-- okay, let's get the
throttle in the right spot. So now we have direct
control of this vehicle. So throttle forward and
then if we want to, yeah. [joystick vibrates] Just blow up random buildings. So let's go find the objective. Oh actually we've got these
little helicopters too, so if we want we can just
straight up jump into a chopper, [laughs] and there we go. So now we're in that, oh, you can feel the
rotors doing their thing. [imitates joystick rotor feel] Ooh, nice little bump there. Okay, let's try to figure
this chopper out, okay. Oh that missile that you
can just follow along. That's not what I wanted to do. [laughs] [joystick vibrating] Heck yeah dude. It's immediately immersive feeling these different types of vehicles react in different ways like this. Back up, there you go. [joystick vibrating, things exploding] Oh yeah, oh yeah. [laughs] And let's just go back to the station. You can also jump into random gun turrets that are just placed
on different buildings. [joystick thunking] Quite a kick on that gun, like seriously. Oh here's the other thing too, if you're not really holding it, you're not gonna get any kind
of like. [imitates joystick] It doesn't do every single time, you have to be giving it some resistance. So if I hold it as light as
possible, you can really see, [joystick banging the desk]
[laughing] Ohh that joystick is happy to see me! [explosions boom] Yeah, suck it random buildings!
And enemies too, I guess. I don't know, may as well. Oh yeah. [gunfire rattling] [laughs] All right, let's move on to
some "Combat Flight Simulator." Another Microsoft game,
so it is very much set to just use the joystick straight away. Force feedback right here,
we got control surface forces, stick shaker, crash effects, ground bumps, and retractable gear
thumps, sounds good to me. Let's just do a random free flight. Anyone else like taking
the Flight Simulator, I think it was "2000" planes,
and putting them in here? You totally can do that. Let's go with a Sopwith Camel
here, more era-appropriate, I suppose. And yeah, let's give it all the beans, 'cause I think we're on like
a grass tarmac of some kind. [airplane engines whirring] A little choppy takeoff
there, but hey, whatever. And now there's not much
of any feedback here, it's just a little bit of resistance. Which, I mean, this is some
pretty gentle flying here, but if we really start
giving us some Gs and stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, it's like
getting [grunts] it's pushing. [gun rattling] Of course you have some going
on with the machine guns and bombs, I don't know if we have bombs. Not on this thing. [gun rattling] [guns continue firing while plane crashes] I gotta say that was a little
bit of an underwhelming crash I think the game crashed too. Nope, it's just-- [laughs] Well let's go with something
a little more exciting. P-51, oh yeah, let's give
it a bunch of rockets. Where do we want to take off from? How about Middle Wallop? All right, lots of beans, there we go. [engine revving up] Now I do have rudder control
as well, which is nice. So just simple twisting here, since they don't have
any pedals or anything. Oh yeah, in the air. [joystick rattles loudly with gunfire] Oh those are more powerful guns! [joystick rattling with force] Yeah, all right. One of the bombs, or
rockets rather, right? Yeah we got rockets. I just like those guns. [joystick rattling] Do something with these flaps, I don't remember how to do the flaps. I can definitely feel the Gs. Much more force on the joystick there. Yeah, in fact it's pushing
me in different ways too, I think there's also some wind. Yeah, I'm not really moving my hand, it's just moving it for me. That's neat. Force feedback sticks are
so cool in flight sims. [gun rattling] Wish I had some buildings to blow up or some other planes but. [laughs] Alright, well bit of a choppy experience. Let's move on to "MechWarrior 3." Wow, this is already
like, weirdly in effect like the centering is aggressive. [grunts] It is really, yeah. Pressing hard, it just
wants to be in the middle. Now this one, I don't believe
it lets you actually enable or do anything in terms of
customizing the force feedback. But it is just on like,
if you have a SideWinder because it uses the API
for this: DirectInput. All right, we'll do some instant action Madcat versus Firefly. [laughs] A highly lopsided battle, that'll be. But you know, and this is actually a game that was bundled with the
joystick, by Hasbro I believe. For a time was definitely
sold in stores together with this in particular. Yeah, lovely Madcat. Extended range lasers,
LRM-15s, Ultra AC5s, good ol' auto cannon, 15 double
heat sinks, we are ready to go! Okay whoa, throttle, throttle, throttle. - [Computer] All systems nominal. - Ya gotta remember
that cuz, uh. Yeah. Okay. Oh yeah, that's feeling so good. It takes serious like, bits of effort to just turn this thing,
it feels heavy and huge. And then when you start moving forward each footstep it's like, oh yeah. [laughs] Ah that's gonna be a lot of heat. - [Computer] Linked fire engaged. - Let's do linked fire
with the lasers for now. [machine whirring] [joystick clicking, missile firing] Ah, screw it. [laughs] Just dump
everything, oh no I missed. [alarms beeping] How is this guy not dead? Oh I just straight up shut down. There we go, well you know what? It's been a while, but this felt amazing. It still feels amazing, just
like just, oh my goodness. This is just about the
most like resistance of any of the games so far. This is force, forceful feedback. Like yeah you're shooting
all those missiles at once. [missiles whooshing] [laughs] Oh dude, that's so good. This thing is so good still. Now, we got one more
and it's pretty special. "Star Wars Episode I: Racer." [Duel of the Fates plays, imitates it humming] I think it's already set. Yeah, I mean we don't
need to calibrate it, 'cause it is the joystick than it is. [whistling Duel of the Fates] [Star Wars intro theme]
[imitates said theme] All right. [computer beeping] Oh yeah, force feedback settings. "Use the force" in this game. Got everything turned up to max! Now we're gonna go with Ebe. This game is fantastic,
and with this stick? Talk about transforming the experience. All right, so it was just a
normal joystick at the moment, but immediately that kicks
in, little bit of resistance. Okay, a lot right there, holy crap. And the engine rumble is just
like, [imitates rumbling] It feels quite good but nothing too crazy. This is perfectly
normal-ish feeling gameplay just with some rumble,
that being said, [laughs] I'm not doing that like
it is all the way back and very erect. [laughs] When you put that engine boost on. Let me get to a place where
I can do it a little better. Oh man, yeah, even that, going this way and that way moves it. Whoa, wow, that's a lot. The feedback on this game is insane when you turn it all the way
up, okay, let's try this again. [engine whining] Yeah, look at that. It's, ugh, it's all the way back. Okay, let's just blow up, that's fine. Oh I somehow survived. It's so much force pushing
back, it's wonderful. [grunts] [joystick clunks] Good grief. This is, it's like arcade, if you've ever played
something like "After Burner," or you know, whatever, any
number of arcade flight and combat games with a joystick where it has some serious force feedback. Okay, that was, I just blew myself up. How do I repair, I don't remember. There it is. Anyway, pretty similar to that. Feels like an arcade game on this, like 'cause it's okay, holy crap. It's just cranked up so high, like as high as it'll
go in the control panel and as high as it'll go in game. Even hitting those. Oh yeah, I can feel it
pulling this way like a lot because of the engine
being out on the right. [joystick vibrating] Look at all this, this is stupid. [laughs] Ugh, I wish they still
made sticks like this. Dude, I think I'm still
gonna make it in first with this terrible race I've been having. Hey, there we go. The power of force feedback baby. Or mostly just very, very
forgiving AI on that mode. Anyway, this is wonderful,
I love this stick. Especially for late '90s games, but honestly I would still
really like to use it with modern stuff. Yeah, this thing is still
just delightful to use 20 whatever the heck years
later, you know, with the games and computers and hardware
that supports it, of course. That does bring up the question, you know, why don't I just
use this on a modern system? It holds up in terms of
the quality and everything, but you have the game port
situation to deal with of course, but there were, you know, later models the Force Feedback 2 and that
had built-in USB support. So that would be an option, if you have one of those instead. But this, you know, I just have this one, so how do I convert this over? Well there are things like the
USB RockFire gameport device. It's kind of old at this
point, but you know, was a popular solution for
doing that type of thing, it just will not translate
everything that this does. I don't think all of the inputs, because there are kind of a lot. And also the fact that the force feedback, the way that it works relies
on some MIDI in and out pins and things like that,
that is just not going to do. The same unfortunately
with more modern solutions like the gameport adapter by Necroware. And this is awesome and it
does have built-in support for the Force Feedback Pro, but again, you're not gonna get the actual
force feedback part of it, at least not yet. I think it may be updated in the future hopefully to add that, but as of now it'll just let
you use it as a normal joystick and that's kind of missing the point. And there have been
other projects, you know, there are things using Teensies
and various microcontrollers, specifically I'm thinking of the FFB-Vert. That was apparently a really good solution and that actually does
provide force feedback support for this in particular. I don't have one of those
or else I show that off. But yeah, it's kind of a
niche within a niche thing and so I don't know, that really just gets me to the question of why the heck aren't
force feedback sticks really a thing at all anymore? Why haven't more companies
made these since then? After all force feedback is
practically a requirement with wheels and racing sims, but it's a true rarity
in modern flight sticks. Well, online this has been speculated
quite a bit over the years and I've seen discussions
about, you know, patent trolls and things being held back legally with wranglings going on
behind the scenes and whatnot. And while there are
little kernels of truth to that here and there, that is definitely not the full story. If you'd like a really
good video on the topic, I'd very much recommend
this one by Flight Dojo going over the specifics. But to kind of sum things up, patents are only part of the story, but for that it does all go back to when Microsoft
acquired EXOS Incorporated to spearhead the SideWinder product line and also partnered with
Immersion Corporation to develop what would become the Force Feedback Pro controllers. Immersion holds many hundreds of patents on this kind of stuff. A majority, from what I gather, pertaining to force feedback technology. So they were a natural
choice for collaboration. And so together Microsoft
created their line of FFB SideWinders starting in 1997, and ending just four years later with the aforementioned Force
Feedback 2 in August of 2001. Which you might notice is right before the release of the Xbox, which Microsoft Game Studios
of course focused on from there. And only two more joysticks
ever hit store shelves that licensed their API
and technology and stuff. The 2005 Saitek Cyborg Evo Force and the 2009 Logitech G940,
and well, that was that. The tech for Direct Input
API force feedback joysticks is tied to Microsoft and
Immersion, and the patents and all that are still out
there, they could be licensed. But it's just one of those
niche within a niche within a niche things that there's simply not enough interest. And there have been other
force feedback sticks since '09 but all using
their own technology. Relying on plugins and specific software instead of simply working
with Direct Input. On this note, I asked
LGR Twitter followers about their own feedback
stick experiences, and it's about what I expected. Most of y'all seem to enjoy the things until they broke or until
the novelty wore off, of simply had to stop using
them due to lack of games and drivers or overall
OS and developer support. It makes sense really, unless you're willing to
spend a whole lot of money on something like what's
offered by Brunner, we don't really have many options. Though there is a bit more
affordable glimmer of hope with homebrew projects
like the VP Force Rhino FFB, which does indeed support Direct Input, it looks fantastic. But it's another one of
those extremely niche things and there's only one guy making them, and orders are backed up into
the hundreds, last I checked. So as much as I would like one of those, I guess for now I'm gonna
be sticking with the classic Force Feedback SideWinders
and things like that, which you know, all think considered, considering how silly this is, [laughs] it's not the worst position to be in. And if you had or have any of
these force feedback sticks, let me know your experiences, whether or not you still use it. Yeah, pretty much all the
stuff I asked about on Twitter, I really am interested in
what the legacy of these is and what the future may hold. And I hope that you
enjoyed seeing this video just farting around with one. I had fun making it at least. And as always, thanks for watching.
