By hrvoje on Friday, June 30, 2006 - 04:52 am:

Can some one please send me fixed driver?
hrvoje_im@yahoo.com

By Anonymous on Friday, June 23, 2006 - 12:00 pm:

Does the correct picture display in the control panel test page? Many of these products are only minor differences, so as long as it works, and correct picture is display then I'd not worry about it :)

By Marko on Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - 04:18 pm:

I have a question:

I have Logitech Formula Force EX wheel but in drivers 4.60 it says Logitech Formula Force ''FX'' and not EX.

Why?

Please answer me on E-mail: marko.zunic@globalnet.hr

By tom on Sunday, June 4, 2006 - 06:14 pm:

Thank you guys, collectively, for giving feedback on this, and your patience before. Seems we have a winner here, this will be integrated into the next release.

By Juupeli on Sunday, June 4, 2006 - 12:35 pm:

I have now quickly tested the beta fix driver with ToCA RD2 and Richard Burns rally. In both cases the twitches/spikes are virtually gone.

I did not try to activate the centering spring yet. I will try that as soon as possible.

I'm very pleased with your progress. This does effectively seem to fix the problem for me. If the twitches still do occur, they are so weak as to not disturb me. During my driving tests I didn't notice any abnormal behaviour. It now felt like all my driving errors were actually my own fault. ;)

Thank you very much, Wingmanteam! Keep up the good work.

By Robert on Thursday, June 1, 2006 - 01:34 pm:

It's working!!!!

Thanks

By tom on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 - 05:44 pm:

Juupeli et al.:

we have finally found some time to closely investigate this problem. If any of you want to try a fixed driver version, please send me an e-mail for an update (that I should have shortly). If this solves the problem, it will be rolled into the next driver release, due out in the not too distant future.

Thanks for the continued patience.

PS: my e-mail is my name at wingmanteam.com

By Roland (Roland) on Thursday, May 25, 2006 - 01:40 pm:

Hellu Juupeli and crowd

I just wanted to let you know that we haven't forgotten about this isse. As you have correctly guessed, we are under staffed and we do have high priority projects on our desks. Nevertheless, we still maintain these boards and read up on user issues and try to help out as best we can. There are also other forums which we monitor and post advice - and it's not necessarily about steering wheels only. We want feedback from our customers and try to find fixes for problems with our devices - all of them.

That being said, I hope you can find some more patience in this matter. We *will* fix it - eventually.

By Juupeli on Thursday, May 25, 2006 - 05:23 am:

Well... 4 months have passed and still no progress on this problem. Three months after reproducing the problem you still haven't found the time to try and solve it? I'm starting to feel let down...

Any progress? Any hope of progress in the near future or should I try to get my money back? These questions are foremost in my mind...

The situation at Logitech seems quite poor, if you are so over worked that your ability to react is this poor. I have a feeling that the Wingman Team is doing it's best, but is woefully under staffed.

There does seem to be quite a lot of different problems on a variety of controllers for you to fix. I can understand that there is a need to prioritize them and my case can't be right at the top of your list. There are probably more serious problems with other controllers, but this problem is in effect preventing me from using the wheel. It does cause real problems in games that require a lot of precision when driving (Richard Burns, ToCA RD2 ...). These games do not forgive the player if he suddenly pulls on the wheel while driving at high speed (which is what this twitching effectively seems to do).

I'm feeling a great urge to make a complaint to Logitech for their poor quality of service. They should invest more in driver development (What good is hardware if the drivers don't work?). Having what seems to be a defective product for over 4 months and not getting the problem solved gives me a very bad image of Logitech which is a big operator. Shame on them.

End of rant/venting.

By Anonymous on Saturday, May 20, 2006 - 07:06 am:

Just want to add that I also have this problem
with my new Force EX :(
Hoping for a fix soon......
I am running LFS.

By Robert on Sunday, May 7, 2006 - 02:50 am:

Hello! Is there any progress????

By Tom (Tom) on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 - 06:58 pm:

.. and thanks for your continued patience!

By Tom (Tom) on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 - 06:57 pm:

I wish I had. It's on the radar but right now there's just so much going on that it's hard to find some time. I'll see (again) if I can get things moving...

By Juupeli on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 - 10:31 am:

Well, it's been almost a month since I last felt that actual progress was being made concerning the unwanted and unexpected FF shocks (short impulses) we get with the Formula Force EX.... Have you found the time to look at the problem at all, Tom?

By Vladimir Kadlec on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 09:57 am:

To be precise, I'm using electronics from Wingman Formula Force GP, this one: http://www.joystickreview.com/images/logitech/wingmanformulaforcegp.gif

By Vladimir Kadlec on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 09:35 am:

I'm sorry for misunderstandings. I'm using electronics from LWFF. The non electronic parts (motor, wheel, etc.) are from red MOMO(*).

To the described problem. I found, that sometimes the "blackout" appears when turning to the right also. Unfortunatelly, it is not deterministic, I'm not able to reproduce it. Still, I can reproduce the twitching, when turning left, as described below. If you would like me to be more detailed, tell me.

(*)If you know, where to find/buy original electronics from red MOMO, please, let me know. Thank you.

By tom on Saturday, April 8, 2006 - 07:11 pm:

I have no idea what you are running. In one of your messages you state, "My wheel is red MOMO, but with tweaked electronic from Wingman Formula Force GP." and then go on to mention serial port (which did not exist for either the red MOMO nor the Formula Force GP"). As such I find it hard to give any advice.

On Win9x, the 4.60 *should* support the old LWFF (pre-MOMO, back from 1998). On XP, the LWFF never quite made it; the last release with semi-official support is 4.50+add-on.

As for MOMO (both the MOMO Force with red base as well as the MOMO Racing with a black base), these are supported on all platforms in the current release. Similarly, Formula Force GP is supported with current releases. None of these have serial port, they are USB-only.

By Vladimir Kadlec on Saturday, April 8, 2006 - 05:50 pm:

Hmm, it seems, that I was wrong again. Wingman 4.60 doesn't support LWFF serial version, but it should work fine with LWFF usb version (which I'm using). Am I right?

By Vladimir Kadlec on Saturday, April 8, 2006 - 01:38 pm:

I'm sorry. I found here:
http://www.wingmanteam.com/discus/messages/3/3798.html
that LWFF is not supported with Wingman 4.60, so the downgrading the Wingman software probably solve my problem.

By Vladimir Kadlec on Saturday, April 8, 2006 - 11:04 am:

Hello, I have the same problem. Wingman 4.60, Windows 98 SE, DX9, the game is LFS S2 Q full version. My wheel is red MOMO, but with tweaked electronic from Wingman Formula Force GP. Thus, first of all, I thought, that this problem comes from my tweaking.

The problem appears only with the setup described by Juupeli. I.e. "Enable Centering Spring in Force Feedback Games" checkbox is _not_ checked. When I check the checkbox, the problem disapears (the slider for the strength can be in zero position).

I'm able to reproduce the described behaviour.

By Robert on Sunday, April 2, 2006 - 02:23 pm:

Have the same problem!
Fix this bug please!!!!!!!!!!

By tom on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 11:12 pm:

Well, Formula Force EX appears to have a distinct strange behavior not noted on other wheels (bug?). Juupeli has a point - more investigation needed for finding the root cause.

By Togt on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 07:15 pm:

i had the same issue i think with a DFP wheel
this is what fixed it for me

1 you can reverse effects in GTL,GTR or
2 you can invert axis in the profiler,then reselct axis in game. either one should fix the problem. do one or the other.
also turning ff levels lower fixes different issues in different sims/games

By Juupeli on Monday, March 27, 2006 - 02:10 am:

Having the twitching/shocks that happen near the wheels center position have made me not want to start playing my driving simulators until the problem is fixed.

I do consider this a defective product until the unwanted shocks are gone and will consider trying to get it replaced if a fix will not be made.

I have gotten the run-around from LG electronics once and I'm not going to accept it again from any company.

I bought an LG DVD/CD writer combo (the 4160B) last year only to find out that booktype setting had been disabled because of a problem in the driver. Because of this I can't burn DVD's in a way that they would be identified as DVD-ROMs instead of DVD+/-Rs. As a result this my DVD's might not work in some DVD players.

I was given assurances from LG's product support for a month or two that the problem would be fixed... but it never happened.

I'm just saying this to underline the fact that I'm not at all happy with the way things are now and would really like to get a fix at some point. At least some kind of reassurance that the problem is really fixable, when you find the time to do it, would be nice.

Naturally you have to prioritize things and it seems that the WingMan Team is under staffed and overworked. I just hope this problem doesn't get buried under the other problems you have to solve.

By tom on Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 02:25 am:

It's not a shameless bump, and yes, we are busy. No progress has been made since the last update. Perhaps one of these days... thanks for reminding me. Had almost dropped off my radar.

By Juupeli on Thursday, March 23, 2006 - 01:49 am:

Still waiting for a response.

I guess the team is busy (with something else probably) or the problem is more difficult to get a hold of and/or fix than one would have assumed at first.

Any progress Tom?

... and yes, this post is bordering on being a shameless 'BUMP'.

By Anonymous on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 05:06 am:

Any news guys?

By Juupeli on Monday, February 20, 2006 - 12:02 am:

"we have managed to reproduce the problem and will take a closer look at it" - Tom

That's great! I hope it's just some small bug in the software side... Thank you very much in advance for looking into this problem and sorry for not finding the time to make a "Good Problem Description" as the one you've outlined on your team page (http://www.wingmanteam.com/team.htm). Fortunately you've managed to reproduce the problem anyway.

If the problem can be fixed, it would make this product that much better and make me feel happier/confident with my purchase.

By tom on Friday, February 17, 2006 - 07:58 pm:

Juupeli & crowd - we have managed to reproduce the problem and will take a closer look at it. Stay tuned (I'm out of the office the next week so don't expect any immediate feedback...)

By Anonymous on Thursday, February 16, 2006 - 05:05 am:

i have the same problem

By Juupeli on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 - 07:27 am:

I would still like to hear what Tom has to say about my previous post that I wrote on Sunday, February 5, 2006 - 12:13 pm before I'd let this one go.

Turning the overall force feedback strength down to 70% is of course not a real solution to the problem. It's just a way of making it less apparent.

Even if I drop it to 70%, I still get these 'shocks' around the middle position of the wheel. Also at 70% the force feedback is way too weak for my tastes. I can hardly notice it's there anymore.

By Krono on Sunday, February 12, 2006 - 05:37 am:

hello again,

i made a final conclusion: this wheel has a weak force feedback (comparing to momo or microsoft sidewinder). that's why these twitches appear. the default settings in the game controller options are all set to 100%. for example, gtr has some option:
""" FFB steer force output max="1.70000" // Maximum force output of steering force, recommendation 0.8 to 2.0 """
so when 100% is multiplied by 1.7 we get 170% force feedback (i guess..) which is just too much for the wheel..

well.. i kind of solved my problems turning down overall force feedback strength to about 70%.

although the force feedback is pretty weak now, i can play games without any twitches.

peace.. ;)

By Krono on Monday, February 6, 2006 - 07:18 am:

well.. i gave my wheel to the warranty service just in case, someone tested it and they told me that the wheel was ok. that is, not with gtr or with gt legends (which i play the most), but in general. when i asked them to test it with some games, they told me that gtr and gt legends are not compatible with this wheel (i guess the same goes to other games?). so they tested it with nfs: most wanted. and told me that everything was normal. i don't have a full version of this game, so i can't argue.. (and i don't really like the game anyway) but what the hell, i lend it from my friends someday and try it out.

meanwhile, i tried some more gtr gaming.. and want to say, that either the wheel's force feedback is somehow dissimilar or the game produces dissimilar effects: when i turn the wheel to the right, it feels like the wheels of the car are gripping with the ground and the wheel produces some effects which meant to show us, that the grip varies, so the force feels like going over some “speed bumps”. what meant to say, that the ff effects tighten a bit then loosen a bit and so on. and i can feel that these changes in force feedback strength depend on a sinus (maibe) function therefore there are no sharp ones.. but when i turn left.. these “speed bumps” are just some sharp twitches or shocks (very annoying too).

could it be that (as these games don’t recognize the wheel) these games send wrong messages to the wheel? this is that possible, right? i mean that the game tells, for example, some momo wheel “” meaning “force to the right-sinus”, and this formula force ex wheel interprets the same binary number (or code if you like) as a force for a different direction or with a different description (instead of sinus): exponent or maybe constant (if there is such)?

btw, it's really nice to have a wingman team member talking to us. it's just hard to tell the difference between posters in this discussion board. there should be some kind of sign or a picture, or a wingman logo ;) next to wingman team member's names. then we wouldn't have complained in the first place. once again, sorry about that..

By Juupeli on Sunday, February 5, 2006 - 12:13 pm:

Hi! Sorry it took so long for me to write again...

Oh... and sorry Tom! I wasn't aware that you we're a 'dev'. Great to have you here. All your help is appreciated.

> Any possibility of a loose power plug?

Well... I have to say the power connector on the wheel base doesn't feel very sturdy... I did unplug it and re-attached it. I don't know but it might have helped a little or then I was just more sensitive to the problem last time when testing.

> When the forces go out, how long would you say they're gone for? A second? less?

The lapses seem to last about a second(?). The twitches have a very short duration. More like shocks.

>Does this happen when you are just sitting at the desktop? (the centering spring you get is a force, too)

Interestigly enough... no I don't. I have the wheel connected right this moment. The LED indicates I've got power and the wheel centers itself if I move the wheel to the sides. This centering seems to work just fine. I can move the wheel to its fartest left or right positions and the wheel allways returns to it's center position without a hitch. When the centering spring is enabled I can fight the wheel any way I wan't but I can't get it to 'twitch'.

I've done more game testing and would now have to admit that I only seem to experience the longer lapses in force feed back effects while playing Need For Speed: Underground 2. This might just be due to bad programming. After all, this game was made for all the current platforms and high quality FF wheel control was probably not highest on their list of things to do.

In Richard Burns Rally and ToCA Race Driver 2 the situation doesn't seem to be really bad at all. I don't seem to get long lapses in FF, but I still do get the slightly annoying twitches when I turn the wheel from left to right over the center position.

The problem seems to stem from the Wingman Profiler / Game Controller advanced settings : "Sprin Effect Strength" and "Enable Centering Spring in Force Feedback Games". If I turn these off (spring effect strength = 0% and ECSIFFG = OFF), the twitching stops but my wheel naturally also goes limp.

Summa summarum: I'm starting to think (my experience so far) that the lapses in FF are more game related (crappy FF in NFS:UG2), but the twitching that happens near the wheels center position seem to be software related since I don't get twitching in the test programs or on the desktop but in games (ALL OF THEM) the wheel twitches (...when the centering spring is in use). The game generated extra FF effects are too much for the wheel and it gets confused?

By tom on Saturday, February 4, 2006 - 09:51 am:

Blackouts for up to a second! That's a pretty serious break. How often does this happen? All of the time? Every few minutes? Every hour once?

I am honestly out of ideas what it could be. The only other thing I could suggest is to try it on another PC first and see if it behaves the same. If it does, I would be quite sure that the wheel is faulty (but can't imagine what might be wrong inside to cause this sort of a behavior?).

And oh, don't my 5 replies count as "visits from the wingman team"?

By Krono on Saturday, February 4, 2006 - 05:59 am:

i don't think, that the power plug is loose, if that was the case, would the wheel function normally when turning to the opposite direction?

the forces disappear, well.. it's hard to tell, but i think i get "black outs" not more than for a second.

and finally, there is no problems at the desktop. but this just means that the wheel can't handle complex force feedback effects. maybe, there's some kind of resonance when games produce more sinus (and other) effects therefore the wheel gets some kind of overflow and shuts itself down for a moment.

at the end.. i think Juupeli is right, as no one from the wingman team comes to visit their own discussion board, then we should write complains to them and get their attention this way..

By tom on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 08:24 am:

Any possibility of a loose power plug?

When the forces go out, how long would you say they're gone for? A second? less?

Does this happen when you are just sitting at the desktop? (the centering spring you get is a force, too)

By Juupeli on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 02:31 am:

Hello everybody.

I bought a Logitech Formula Force EX about a week ago and I'm experiencing the same strange impulses/twitches that some of you have described. It does seem to only happen when turning to the left and force feedback effects are in effect. The wheel suddenly goes limp (loses power) and very soon afterwards wakes up again and tries to center the wheel or turns on the force effects again. This is very annoying and realistic car simulator games suffer greatly from this twitching (When driving at 120+ Mph/Kph, you don't want to make sudden steering movements!). The twitches can't be game produced events since I'm driving on a smooth road, keeping a steady speed (constant gas/brake) and slowly turning the wheel to the left.

I haven't had the proper time to put into testing this issue yet, but I have tried to recalibrate my wheel, updating my DirectX 9.0c drivers to the latest december 2005 batch, turning off my SW firewall and AntiVirus software. None of this has helped. (I also don't have the Java JRE installed.)

The 'twitches' don't seem to be connected to drops in frame rate, since usually my games are running very nicely when the wheel starts twitching. The twiching doesn't seem to happen during calibration or when running the test after calibration. Not even while fighting the forces generated by the test effects. (I've tried the effects that want to force the wheel to the leftmost or rightmost postion and pulling slowly back on them... I don't feel any 'twitching'. Just a steady force fighting back.)

This problem happens in all the games that I've tried. The full version games have been updated to their latest versions. I've tried Richard Burns Rally, ToCA Race Driver 2 & 3 (demo), Neef For Speed: Underground 2 and Most Wanted (demo). I'm going to try the GTR demo soon as well.

To generate some credibility to this problem we should all propably do as the WingMan Team advises and post thorough/proper problem descriptions of the problem. See the following link or go to the main page and select 'team' from the menu.

http://www.wingmanteam.com/team.htm

I'll do this my self once I can find the time.

Hope we get some kind of answer from the devs because this site seems quite dead to me...

By Pedrosol on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 - 12:38 pm:

Have the same problem, when you try left , only left turns, the wheel has this shocking effects which i am sure is not part of the game at all.
Now it turns out other people have the same problem something must be wrong with this wheel.I think about going back to the shop and get some other wheel.

By Krono on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 - 03:13 pm:

the same problem here..

i have windows xp with sp1 and Logitech® Gaming Software 4.60.

the games in which i feel those "cracks" are: GTR fia racing game, GT Legends and nfs most wanted.

recently i invited a friend with an old microsoft ff wheel and everything was ok with those games on my system...

those force feedback issues i get in GTR or GTL feel.. well, i'd call those randomly generated dead zones or something like that.. (my friend had the same thoughts). when i try to turn to the left the wheel thinks "hmmm... what to do? what to do?" and then i get the feeling if there was no ff at all, and suddenly the wheel wakes up and everything's back to normal... this happens very fast and sometimes 2-3 times in a row :(

oh.. and those games run really smoothly, besides, if there were any frame rate issues then why do these annoying "effects" occur when turning to the left only?

regarding other software.. well.. i don't have any unneeded processes running in the background and i always turn off my antivirus software before launching games.. so i think that's not the case of other programs interfering with the game..

i hope there is a solution to this problem somewhere..

btw, should i try returning this wheel to the shop? at least it has a warranty of 3 years..

By tom on Sunday, January 8, 2006 - 05:03 pm:

If the centering force is correct then it means the wheel's hardware is performing properly, as the "centering" uses the same hardware (the motor) as game forces do.

There is a chance that your particular setup (USB controller and drivers mainly, but possibly other applications running in the background) would cause such a behavior. Is your frame rate smooth, or does it have hiccups, too?

Do you have another system to try it on?

By Gregory P on Sunday, January 8, 2006 - 10:22 am:

This is strange but in deskop centering force works well.
In games when I turn on only this centering force it is also ok.
Only when other ff efects are turned on it starts again.
As I said, I am not at 100% sure that centering force is broken. I feel in my hands, during those impulses, that centering force wants the wheel to go back but.. I don't know how to say it in english :) .. it cant and I get these impulses. Maby 'choping' would be the right word :)
Big thanks for trying to help!

By tom on Sunday, January 8, 2006 - 10:03 am:

So when you are just sitting at the desktop, outside the game, and have the centering spring active, do you also get pulses when moving the wheel to the left?

If you have another PC you could try this on, that would probably be a good idea...

By Gregory P on Sunday, January 8, 2006 - 08:09 am:

Unforunatlly it happes to all games I had playing.
need for speed ug2, most wanted, demos:
flatout,toca (the newest one) , Live for speed, and many others.
I am sure, impulses are not coming from game couse it happens only to left turn. I am almost sure that it has something to deal with force geting wheel back to the center position.
Let's take need for speed most wanted.
We want to make a spin in a place to the left.We stand still, turn wheel to the left and press full accelerate.And now about 3 times per second I have fast impulses.Sometimes the balance is changed during "spin" and the force wants to take wheel to left. And now everything is ok.But after few seconds, balance change again, now force wants the wheel back to the center and those strange impulses strats again.
When the spin is to the right side, no mather what balance at the moment is and to what side the force wants to take the wheel, everything is fine.

By tom on Saturday, January 7, 2006 - 11:25 am:

Which game are you talking about? And it is very possible that the impulses are coming from the game, sometimes the force feedback shows weaknesses in the world design; if the tracks have patches with discontinuities on the ground, the physics may well generate a sharp spike in force for a very brief time.

By Gregory P on Thursday, January 5, 2006 - 02:31 pm:

Hello. I bought few days ago this wheel.
After few hours of playing, now I can see which of impulses from force feedback are there because programers of game wannted them to be and which are not. What I mean :
Very often ,when I take a GENTLY turn to the LEFT (only left!) , on a flat road,without any bumps , I get strange impuls from ff or sometimes even few quick impulses. It feels like hiting a kerb or other bump but at the moment under wheels ,road is completly flat! It is very anoing :(
And the funniest thing is:
This is second wheel. First one went back to the shop because of the same problem!
I use win xp sp2. I have tried on other PC (the same results) with also xp sp2.

Am I sooo lucky and got two broken wheels from one shop? Or there is something wrong with my computers. (one ok,I admit, it is possible, but two??)
Thanks id advance