That driver must predate Windows 7, then, which was released in 2009. I've found drivers from Vista or before don't want to work with Windows 10 in some fashion anyhow (perhaps the 32-bit to 64-bit transition?).
Possibly. I've had the thing for close to 20 years, I think. It came with a bundle that had a sound card and a DVD (or maybe even CD) drive. It's USB, though, so it can't be that old!
Just out of curiosity: Have you ever considered just buying a new controller? Spending your time on troubleshooting drivers doesn't seem like a sensible decision from the time=money point of view.
Of course! I do own other controllers! There are just some games that don't seem to recognize newer controllers the same way (the original Mortal Kombat being one of them). I'm not saying that my issue is common and I realize that I'm putting this issue on myself, I just mentioned it because it's a situation that highlights why their "solution" to the problem they have is more of a workaround rather than an actual fix. As others have pointed out, the correct "solution" is to de-prioritize their own drivers. It's their driver and their OS. They could even have a flag that's set in the driver for OS that also affects priority.
From what I can tell, the "solutions" presented here don't actually solve anything, make things a lot more complicated, and just open new cans of worms. For niche cases there are always good workarounds.
USB 1.0 came out in 1996 (I recall a special release of Windows 95 had embryonic support for it), so close to 20 years, indeed! The fact you can get the driver to work at all is pretty impressive, given it's not getting updates.
