And if you don't like the "gear driven" part of it, let me tell you, it's *quite* a bit better than Formula Force GP!

cheers,
..tom

By aidan on Friday, September 28, 2001 - 08:18 am:

1) Some initial tests on my system did not highlight any significant difference in frame rate between have FF enabled and disabled in N4 game (P3 1GHZ GeForce2 256MB) using a WMFF. Not sure what this means but I thought I should mention it in this thread.

2) MOMO Force is a gear drive system. It will be available in Europe. I think you should be able to see copies in stores so that you can evaluate it ?

By Joachim Böddeker on Friday, September 28, 2001 - 02:44 am:

thanks for the info aidan,

aother question, does the new momo wheel use the cable driven ff technology like the original Wingman Wheel? Or is it gear driven like the GP wheel?

I don't care about momo logo and the "hand-stitched, genuine leather", just the technical aspects are interesting.

Will it be available in Germany/Europe as well?

thanks,

Joachim

By aidan on Monday, September 24, 2001 - 06:55 pm:

The older WMF and WMFF products are PID compliant (PID is the set of force feedback extensions to HID...see www.usb.org). Under Win2000 you can check if a device is PID compliant by seeing if PID.DLL is loaded.

The path for these devices would be something like DX->PID->logidriver->USBdriver.

According to Tom's theory PID.DLL may not be efficient as possible under Win2000 and depending on the game FF implementation there may be extra non-essential USB traffic/commands generated ?

As Tom states the path for all newer Logitech FF designs is DX->logidriver->USBdriver, so that more of the path is under our control just like we would like it. It means more work for us, but it gives us more control of our own destiny/performance.

FYI, many other non-Logi devices use PID.

By Joachim Böddeker on Monday, September 24, 2001 - 05:52 pm:

Tom,

i did not completely get your explanation.

Did you say this is an issue with W2k and old logitech products, or an issue with W2k and and old games?

According to my opinion games create FF-effects via directx(directinput). directx then passes the commands to the (Logitech-) driver.

If it's an issue with w2k and old Logitech products, shouldn't a driver update help?
(why are microsoft components part of the old drivers, and not of the new ones?)

If it's an issue with W2k and old games, how may the new logitech products not suffer?

thanks for info,

Joachim

By Ryan on Sunday, September 23, 2001 - 09:03 pm:

Thanks Tom and Aidan for your help! Yes, my celeron was running Win98, so I am very disappointed that Win2k is at fault :-( Do you know, or can you tell me if this will be fixed in the future?? If not, I am beginning to think that a dual boot with Win98 will be necessary just so I can run Nascar4 fast. Thanks again!

By Tom (Tom) on Saturday, September 22, 2001 - 05:54 pm:

Very possible this wouldn't happen on Windows 9x - you mention you had it working on your Celeron with N4 without trouble; was that on Windows 9x?

In Windows 2000 - this is for the original Formula Force and WingMan Force only -, we have limited control over what amount of USB traffic is generated by games doing force feedback, as part of the components for it are owned by Microsoft. I have noticed that it seems to generate more packets than really necessary, but at the level where our software comes in we're not in the position to filter those extra packets out anymore, since we don't know what the intention was in the first place.

Shouldn't happen with Formula Force GP or the new announced wheel (http://www.logitech.com/cf/about/pressRelease.cfm/2963), since it's all up to our own code to do the force stuff - I realize this doesn't help you much... I'm just talking from a technical perspective here.

..tom

By aidan on Thursday, September 20, 2001 - 02:27 pm:

I really don't know ... the only person in a position to do such an analysis would be the game developer. There are lots of ways to implement FF in a game, some are more efficient than others. In addition there are some design decisions that a game developer can make to determine if more of the force processing load should be done by the device, or on the host PC.

As a reference in some of the GPL related racing sites/newgroups you will find an analysis by the GPL developers of the impact of using different types of drivers/wheels with respect to CPU time consumed (i.e. Logitech versus Microsoft versus ...etc...). We're very happy with the results of that analysis :-)

If you have any contacts with the N4 development team then we'd be happy to review the issue with them.

Finally, since implementation of FF requires more USB traffic then it you should ensure that you have the latest bus/board drivers for your system.

By Ryan on Tuesday, September 18, 2001 - 08:57 pm:

Hi,
After finally getting my LWFF (the original) to work in Win2k, I ran into Nascar 4 problems. Before, with the keyboard, I could get 75-80 fps. I am running a 1.2 GHz Athlon, 256meg RAM,a Geforce 2 MX 64 meg, and the wheel is hooked up via USB. Once I enable the force feedback and calibrate the wheel within the game, frame rates drop to 40-55. Talk about ouch!! I can run GPL with FF enable at 1600x1200 and I used to have the wheel running on a celeron 366 in N4 with no frame rate drop due to hooking the wheel up. What gives???