Force Feedback and Wine
Force Feedback allows an application (typically a game) using DirectInput to trigger kinetic stimuli in the user.
What you need
- Force feedback hardware compatible with linux
- Logitech's original Wingman Force is the ideal choice here. Note that the Wingman Force 3D will not work at this time.
- Other joysticks using the iForce protocol can also be used.
There has been some work on getting PID protocol joysticks such as Microsoft SideWinder Force series to work.
- Refer to your kernel documentation for details.
- A relatively modern linux kernel.
- The 2.6 series has iForce drivers built in.
- Refer to your kernel documentation for details.
- Wine must be built on a machine with a kernel with recent FF support.
- If you are building wine yourself, check for "ac_cv_member_struct_ff_effect_direction=yes" in config.log.
- On Linux you can test your joystick force feedback and different effects by using the "fftest" tool.
- Your application must have Force Feedback support.
A good test application to see if Force Feedback is working on wine is bzflag (http://www.bzflag.org/). Download the linux version and run it natively, and compare to the windows version running in wine. The FF effects should be the same.
Development
Most force feedback functionality was implemented during the Summer of Code, 2005. See ForceFeedbackSummerOfCode2005Summary for details.