Mod your MS Sidewinder Steering Wheel Pedals (1)

Originally Posted on October 31, 2015

Having recently found an odd interest in Farming Simulator 15 (actually it started with Farming Simulator 2013), I remembered I had an old Microsoft Sidewinder Force-feedback steering wheel and pedals stashed somewhere in my loft, and so thought it would be a good idea to bring them out of hibernation and see how they worked on my PC now.

Bear in mind this is a very old wheel, and I really had no hope that there would be any drivers to make it work on the latest OS (Windows 10), added to that many nay-Sayers on numerous forums who were saying no drivers existed – I actually got it to work without too much hassle…. well, almost.

Plugging into my PC it was recognised straight away with no issues, and the basic “Set up USB game controllers” control panel in Windows 10 worked fine and I could test all the buttons and pedals fine. However, by default the accelerator and brake are on two different axis’ (Y and Z) which caused an issue in FS15 as it has no in-built option to use two axis, it will only use a combined accelerate/brake option. With no option in either the game, or the control panel to change this, I was stuck!

Then I came across a couple of YouTube videos where “Rabid Stew” had made some modifications to his steering wheel pedals and got things working, he documented it very well and without this superb resource and the effort put in by him to share this, I would have got nowhere. However, I did feel Rabid Stew’s solution was a little clumsy and needed some effort to convert the wheel from one setting to another, a couple of commenter’s on the videos had mentioned using other means for switching modes, and this is what I investigated further.

First – you must go and watch these two videos by Rabid Stew – there are also links to download his extremely useful “schematic” of the pedals:

Rabid Stew Video 1

Rabid Stew Video 2

I’ll then explain my version of this in more detail in the second part of this series.