Vista - Possible Fix: Microsoft Force Feedback 2 Joystick and the self center force disabling

Hello,

I have a Microsoft Force Feedback 2 Joystick working with the Vista X64 Driver that comes built in.

I noticed that games that has support for Force Feedback will disable the Self Centering Feature of the stick and makes it go limp.

For example, on IWAR2 - when I enabled the force effects, the stick got limp and wouldn't autocenter. Disabling the force effects from within the game worked alot better, the autocenter feature still worked.

Problem was with the new game that I just purchased - X3 Terran Conflict which had force feedback support which can't be disabled. The stick went limp everytime I started the game.

I fixed it by disabling direct input from detecting that the stick is Force Feedback capable.

Basically, with RegEdit,

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/MediaProperties/PrivateProperties/Joystick/OEM/VID_045E&PID_001B/OEMForceFeedback

I change the above keys permission to EVERYONE - {"Full Control","Read"} - DENY . Now when I run dxdiag, the stick is not detected as Force Feedback capable anymore and X3TC runs without making the stick go limp. Before making the permission change, DXDIAG had a value for the Force Feedback Driver, now it's "n/a".

Hope this helps other people running into the same problem with other games. Obviously, this disables the force feedback features of the stick (which doesn't work properly with Vista anyways) but gives you a usable one.