For those of you having brake pedal problems with the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback steering wheel I found a work around.
In many of the newer games your pedals are required to work on seperate axis, most steering wheel manufactures have kept up with this demand and have compensated and made the proper adjustments in later driver versions. Unfortunately those of us who bought the Microsoft Sidewinder are out of luck because Microsoft hardware division no longer exists and they no longer support those products. It is possible to set a separate axis with the older v4.0 drivers designed for windows 98, however "the z rotation" can not be configured properly under Windows XP. So the pedal always acts like it's pressed half way down.
Here's what i did to make my Sidewinder work with Need For Speed Most Wanted and it also worked with Midtown Madness 2 in windows xp pro. The best part is it's not all that hard to do, well it's kind of a pain, but it definately beats spending another two hundred buck on a new wheel.
Skip steps 2 through 5 if you've always been running windows xp (meaning you didn't upgrade from 98 or me)and if you have never installed the v4.0 drivers for windows 98.
1. Unplug all usb game controllers from your machine
2. Go to control panel then add and remove programs
3. Unistall windows 98 v4.0 drivers and software for Sidewinder
4. Reboot
5. Plug Sidewinder back in
6. Reinstall standard XP drivers for Sidewinder (These are the drivers that load by default with xp when you plug the controller in). If the original xp drivers aren't automatically loading and your still getting the old 98 drivers, go to the device manager and update the drivers there manually. To find out which driver you have right click on My Computer Icon go to properties, choose the hardware tab then click on device manager, find Human Interface Devices, double click, then right click on sidewinder go to properties then click on Driver tab. Your driver date should be for 7/1/2001 and the version should be 5.1.2600.0. Once you have the drivers straight move on to step six.
6. Go to this address below and scroll to the bottom of the page and download this nifty little app. (it is just an executable file in zip format so create a folder then unzip this file to that folder and your ready to go.) This program will allow you to assign a keyboard function to the y axis up and y axis down on your pedals, therefor separating commands without really separating the axis. http://www.electracode.com/4/joy2key/JoyToKey%20English%20Version.htm
7. Click on your freshly extracted file, JoyToKey.exe
8. Click on Auto setting wizard, when it asks joystick left obivously turn the wheel left, vice versa for the right. (This is the important part) When it asks for joystick up press the gas pedal and when it asks for down press the brake. I went ahead and gave the other eight buttons different assignments too. The only thing you really need to map are the pedals.
9. Leave the app open and start your game. I'm using Need For Speed Most Wanted as an example but it should work with other games as well, I'm two for two on testing games that require duel axis pedals.
10.In the game go to options, controls, then go to keyboard controls, remap the keyboard controls using your steering wheel. I.E. when you click on the brakes in keyboard controls step on the brake it should map it as the down key. I couldn't find anybody else out there who managed to resolve this problem so I hope this helps somebody out there somewhere.
This worked for me, i still get force feed back as well, hope it works for you too.
Peace Yall