I have an old Thrustmaster Ferrari 458 Italia racing wheel that I got a few years back around the advent of the Xbox One so the Xbox 360 peripherals were all being traded in and were cheap. My intention was to use it on the PC mainly and it worked well. In fact I only used it on one game, European Truck Simulator 2. I’d stopped playing the game by 2018 and didn’t re-visit it until 2022 when I dusted off the wheel and plugged it in.
There’s a lot to my setup: Triple monitors configured using nVidia’s Eyefinity so they appear as one to the game. Then there’s the Roccat Powergrid software and OpenTrack for my head-tracking as well as the wheel itself. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pure bliss when your driving that rig across Europe. The only problem, and it was quite a major one, my computer crashed. The errors all indicated a graphics card issue but actually it’s an issue with the driver for the wheel.
This is why PCs can be so frutrating and I often wonder how ‘normal’ people tolerate these issue without the nerdiness or even tenacity I utilise. The driver is the one for an Xbox 360 controller in the PC and I noticed that the version I was using was the 2019 version but the wheel had worked prior to that year. So I manually forced using an older driver and bingo, working again.
This is all done in Device Manager as illustrated below.
In case anybody is struggling to obtain the 2009 driver (as older versions of anything seem increasingly hard to obtain) then I have made it available here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-4Dqkry8CfGUDp55q4L7U4iKbEr5IKB-/view?usp=sharing
If there are issues with this link, drop a comment on this blog post and I will make available to you.