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Releases: DatanoiseTV/vcvrack-sidewinder-ff2

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Sidewinder 2.0.0

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@DatanoiseTV DatanoiseTV released this 21 Aug 12:30

First release.

A single module, Sidewinder FF2, bridging a Microsoft SideWinder Force
Feedback 2 joystick and a patch in both directions.

Stick to CV - X, Y, twist, throttle, hat vector, deflection radius, bearing
and eight button gates, through a radial dead zone and a one-pole smoother.

CV to force - constant force vector, spring, damper, friction, inertia and a
periodic shake with selectable waveform and a 1V/oct rate input, plus master
gain. The spring's neutral point follows the force vector by default, so a CV
pair does not merely push the stick, it places it.

Display - stick position with a fading trail, dead zone, commanded force
vector and spring target, twist and throttle bars, a polar force dial, the hat
rosette, the button grid, and a status block reading live rates, effect slot
usage and the device's own PID state.

Force feedback is spoken as USB HID PID directly rather than through
ForceFeedback.framework, which cannot work here: it dispatches to a per-device
plugin looked up in IOCFPlugInTypes, and macOS ships none for generic PID
joysticks. The README has the details.

Three example patches are included in the source tree under examples/.

Installing

Put Sidewinder-2.0.0-mac-arm64.vcvplugin into
~/Library/Application Support/Rack2/plugins-mac-arm64/ and restart Rack.

Platforms

This build is macOS on Apple Silicon. The device layer is macOS-only; the plugin
builds and loads on other platforms but reports that no backend is compiled in.
An Intel macOS build needs an x86_64 Rack SDK, which was not available here.