Read my full post, I did indeed try that.
I do have an update though since I got it working. Perhaps using the newest version of the FFB plugin was letting me down with the older MAME in Virtua Racing. I did a little more digging and found that there's a fella still compiling new versions of mame for 32bit, you can find them here:
https://www.progettosnaps.net/mameui/Updated to a newer version of mame32 (I think I grabbed .252) and along with the most current version of the MAME32 FFB Plugin Virtua Racing is working! So, not the most direct solution but hey it all works now. The last piece of the puzzle for me is Flycast, but if it's using only mame64 I don't think there's much hope for getting that going on my setup.