Just go and get XP Force and it should work well enough from there until hopefully, one day Asosbo introduces force feedback support to the sim. There are other threads here that you can vote on, so add your support there.
The only time this could happen is if Force Feedback makes a comeback to the market by the manufacturers. There hasn’t been any new force feedback joystick seen in years.
From a business perspective, adding a support for a nearly extinct hardware is a waste of time.
MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro is from 1997 too…
The Microsoft Sidewinder FF Joystick DOES work with MSFS 2020 on Windows 10.
I use one … no issues at all - its a well built & reliable unit.
While MSFS does not a “Included” PROFILE for it. you can easily make your own.
There is also at least one Addon, that goes some way to support the Force Feedback functionality.
One Tip - The Centering forces will stop, after you remove your hand from the Joystick, and go limp . not good !.
What you might want to do is to block the optical Hand sensor, (with something like electrical tape), so that the Joystick remains ACTIVE and Centered, when you temporally take your had off it.
There are plenty of Force Feedback wheels for racing sims, it is just Flight Sims were a dying market, partly due to the exit of MSFS which only left the elitist study level sims and no mass market . If you brought up Force Feedback in an XPlane or P3D forums the typical response was “I am not interested unless the forces can be verified to be exactly how they are in the real aircraft under all flight conditions”.
Which is nonsense, it is like saying I refuse to use a flight yoke at all unless it is exactly identical to the one in the plane I am flying.
There are of course plenty of FFB devices available, Brunner yokes and pedals for example. Just none at the mass consumer price point that Thrustmaster/CH etc market their products at, mainly because there was simply no demand in P3D or XPlane for a consumer level FFB Yoke or stick.
If MS were to provide native FFB support the huge popularity of MSFS in PC and soon in XBox would make consumer level FFB devices (especially XBox compatible ones) a very good business prospect.
I don’t think Flight Sim as a dying market to be reason.
I remember years ago when Logitech released a brand new Force 3D Pro joystick. Then after about a year or so, it just disappears from the market, but Logitech still releases new joystick models afterwards but without Force Feedback.
If flight sim was a dying market, no manufacturer would make any joystick at all. But then again, Flight sim has always been alive. Even though FSX was 15 years ago, XPlane and P3D took up the mantle in FSX absence, and FSX even made a comeback through Steam and until the current MSFS, those 3 flight sim has always been active.
I think it has something to do with the licensing of the patents for force feedback technology. Because Force Feedback joystick was popping up here and there through many manufacturers, then they suddenly disappear at around same time then any newer models that the same manufacturers release afterwards don’t have force feedback anymore.
Yes, from what I remember, it was an issue of patents and licensing. If the owner of the patent(s) revokes it’s licenses, plain simple, MS can’t do anything. We can only wait entry to public domain, a different technology not cut off by patent fencing or luck that a license could be issued again in a reasonable way.
MS FS 2020 doesn’t support MS Joy Sticks. I had an MS Sidewinder J/S and MS FS 2020 wouldn’t recognize it so I went and purchased a Thrustmaster 16000M. My MS J/S was 20 years old. Windows 10 did support my old J/S though as a USB plug and play device.
My Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 works perfectly fine in msfs2020 without any additional software what so ever. Surprised the Pro doesn’t tbh.
It should work with anything that recognises DInput. For those games that only recognise XInput devices, there are plenty of tools out there to convert DInput to XInput.
Fun fact: Did you know that FFB API is same for joystick as well as steering wheel? All racing games do support steering wheel with FFB while most of the flight sims do not support FFB.
