And the other big thing I did today was to replace the standard Windows XBox 360 controller drivers with XBCD.

The built-in drivers technically work, but suffer from a few flaws and missing features. There’s no built-in deadzone adjustment, for example, and a lot of the older games I just installed don’t account for it either, leading it to drift slightly to the left or right when the stick is supposed to be centered. The standard drivers also treat the triggers as a single axis, so that pressing on one is essentially canceled out by a simultaneous press on the other. This matters in things like racing games, where something like a slight tap on the brakes is not the same thing as letting off on the throttle slightly, which is how it gets treated on a single axis.

XBCD solves these problems, and I spent a few hours fiddling around in RACE 07 with it. Unfortunately, gamepads are still a little oversensitive due to the small travel on the sticks, so it’s like you’re frequently slamming the wheel to the extreme left and right. It was still good enough to win a few events though, including one Formula 3000 race in the extreme rain, with even the AI spinning out all over the place. RACE 07 doesn’t really have as much variety to it as other SimBin games, but it’s very well-polished, and the more mid-level cars in it are a lot easier to control than the supercars of GTR2.

I really should be using my wheel more often for racing games, but it’s such a pain to set up and take down…