T598: PC mode uploads FFB effects but motor does nothing; PS Mode 1 has physical FFB but pulls/centers incorrectly

[Kristianwolf-prog]

Hi, I’m trying to use a Thrustmaster T598 on Nobara KDE Linux with hid-tmff2 installed through DKMS.

The wheel has updated firmware. Steering and pedals work, but force feedback behaves differently depending on the wheel mode.

System

Distro: Nobara KDE
Kernel: [paste uname -a]
hid-tmff2 commit: [paste git -C ~/hid-tmff2 rev-parse --short HEAD]
DKMS status: [paste dkms status | grep tmff]

Module loaded:

lsmod | grep -E "tmff|thrust"

Result:

hid_tmff_new 73728 0

Module parameters:

sudo cat /sys/module/hid_tmff_new/parameters/open_mode
sudo cat /sys/module/hid_tmff_new/parameters/timer_msecs

Result:

[paste result]

PC mode

In PC mode, the wheel appears as:

Bus 003 Device 005: ID 044f:b696 ThrustMaster, Inc. Thrustmaster Advance Racer

dmesg shows:

Product: Thrustmaster Advance Racer
tmff2 0003:044F:B696.000B: force feedback for T248

fftest opens the device and uploads effects successfully:

Device /dev/input/by-id/usb-Thrustmaster_Thrustmaster_Advance_Racer-event-joystick opened
Uploading effect #0 (Periodic sinusoidal) ... OK
Uploading effect #1 (Constant) ... OK
Uploading effect #2 (Spring) ... OK
Uploading effect #3 (Damper) ... OK

But when playing the effects, the wheel physically does nothing. No force, no spring, no damper, no rumble.

PlayStation Mode 1

In PS Mode 1, the wheel appears as:

Bus 003 Device 003: ID 044f:b66d ThrustMaster, Inc. Thrustmaster Racing Wheel FFB

dmesg shows:

Product: Thrustmaster Racing Wheel FFB
tmff2 0003:044F:B66D.0006: force feedback for T300RS

In this mode, the motor physically reacts to FFB, but in games like BeamNG.drive and Euro Truck Simulator 2 the wheel constantly centers or pulls left, making it unplayable.

I also tried disabling autocenter manually:

from evdev import InputDevice, ecodes
dev = InputDevice("/dev/input/by-id/usb-Thrustmaster_Thrustmaster_Racing_Wheel_FFB-event-joystick")
dev.write(ecodes.EV_FF, ecodes.FF_AUTOCENTER, 0)
dev.write(ecodes.EV_FF, ecodes.FF_GAIN, 0xffff)
dev.syn()

It prints successfully, but the bad centering/pulling behavior remains.

Tried already

• Installed hid-tmff2 through DKMS
• Ran sudo make udev-rules
• Rebooted
• Used PC mode and PS Mode 1
• Disabled Steam Input for games
• Reset BeamNG input maps
• Tried SDL_JOYSTICK_HIDAPI=0
• Tried open_mode=0 timer_msecs=2
• Blacklisted hid_thrustmaster
• Updated T598 firmware through My Thrustmaster Panel

Expected behavior

In PC mode, fftest should physically drive the wheel when effects are played.

Actual behavior

In PC mode, effects upload successfully but produce no physical force. In PS Mode 1, physical FFB exists, but the behavior is incorrect and pulls/centers the wheel in games, PS Mode 2 (no axis detection and no FFB).

[Kimplul]

Don't have a T598 myself to test with, unfortunately, so I can only guess at things. At least according to this, the PS1 mode should be fine, althought the PC mode has apparently worked at some point: #191 (comment)
Not sure what the difference between it and the PC mode would be though, maybe the difference is between Xbox and PS versions of the wheel?

Anyway, I would maybe first check out Oversteer and try turning the autocentering down, I haven't personally looked into the Python evdev bindings so I'm not entirely sure if the code snippet you posted is valid. I hope that takes care of the wheel pulling to the center, but I'm not entirely sure about the pulling to the left. I haven't seen that myself in the games you mentioned, although something similar occured with RRRE, which should be fixed by now: #39 (comment)

Sidenote, did you use an AI or a template of some kind? Seems you forgot to fill in some [paste ...] fields.

[Kristianwolf-prog]

Thanks. I checked those references.

For #191: my wheel is not the Xbox version. Mine is the PlayStation/PC T598. My IDs are different:

PC mode:
044f:b696 — Thrustmaster Advance Racer

PS Mode 1:
044f:b66d — Thrustmaster Racing Wheel FFB

PS Mode 2:
no usable axes/FFB

The Xbox issue reports 044f:b6a5, so it seems the Xbox and PlayStation versions expose different IDs.

For #39: yes, the PS Mode 1 behavior could be similar to inverted/wrong-direction FFB, because the wheel physically reacts but pulls/centers incorrectly in games.

But the PC mode issue seems different: fftest uploads Constant/Spring/Damper effects successfully, but the wheel physically does nothing at all. So in PC mode it is not inverted FFB; it is no physical motor response despite effects uploading successfully.

And I tried Oversteer too.

It does not detect the wheel at all. It says:

No device available.

This happens even when running it as root with sudo oversteer, so it does not seem to be a permissions issue.

The wheel is visible in /dev/input/by-id:

/dev/input/by-id/usb-Thrustmaster_Thrustmaster_Racing_Wheel_FFB-event-joystick -> ../../event6
/dev/input/by-id/usb-Thrustmaster_Thrustmaster_Racing_Wheel_FFB-joystick -> ../../js0
/dev/input/by-id/usb-Thrustmaster_Thrustmaster_Racing_Wheel_FFB-if00-hidraw -> ../../hidraw5

Permissions:

/dev/input/event6 root:input rw
/dev/input/js0 root:input rw
/dev/hidraw5 root:root rw

My user is also in the input group.

I also checked Oversteer’s wheel_ids.py and it contains both IDs:

T248 = 044f:b696
TM_T300RS_GT = 044f:b66d

So Oversteer seems to know the IDs, but still does not enumerate the device.

And yes, I used ChatGPT because after 2 hours of troubleshooting I got really desperate.

[Kimplul]

Sorry for the delay, frankly I just forgot about this thread.

Anyway, Oversteer not seeing the wheel is weird, and might indicate that the driver is not being loaded properly. Oversteer does have some udev rules that it should try to install, see https://github.com/berarma/oversteer/blob/master/data/udev/99-thrustmaster-wheel-perms.rules. They should be placed into /etc/udev/rules.d, check if they're present.

The dmesg logs would indicate that the wheel is being picked up properly at least. That any FFB is present at all in one of the modes might to indicate that something may be wrong with the games themselves rather than the driver (assuming Thrustmaster hasn't made changes to how FFB operates in their firmware, at least). Did you try running the games via different Proton versions?