Zephyr Net

Hello everyone, I'm glad to have found this website, I really didn't think that so many people would still be playing and enjoying FA.
I have a few question that I hope you could answer, I haven't played FA for YEARS and by chance I found the cd's again and installed it on my laptop.

1) The game crashes.

I installed the game on my laptop (Windows XP Professional SP2) including the patch, and it boots up no problem. Everything seems to work: menus, images, missions, options.
When I start playing at first the game works fine, but after a few minutes (more or less 5 mins) the audio starts cracking up and the framerate drops, and finally my pc totally freezes up and I have to turn it off completely because I can't even get back to windows.
I'm pretty puzzled about this.. Any ideas? I read a few pages in the forum but didn't find a solution to my problem

2) The audio is messed up.

I did a complete install (digital music) and the audio works fine in the menu section and in game the background music is just as I remembered it. What isn't working is all the ''talking'' parts (excuse my english, I'm only half american and living in Italy for the past 14 years!) and for eg. when you change waypoint.. it sounds like a chipmunk is talking, the voices have a very high pitch and the speed of the words is very high..

3) No more Janes games?

My dad bought me ATF when I was very young, maybe 8-10 years old I guess.. I've always loved Janes games (ATF + expansion, USNF'97, FA, 688(I) ), they are FAAAAR better than all the other military games you see on the market. The games i have are still pretty fun, but you can feel the weight of the years that have gone by.. Any news on future games by Janes? It's such a pity that they stopped..


Thanks you for your time, I hope we will be able to play some games online together soon! I'm VERY rusty though, I need to practise a lot.. I don't have my joystick anymore, and on my laptop I don't have the numpad so it's kinda hard to play like this!.. Take care

You mention you have the FA patch installed which is always good to hear. Just to be sure, does the game seem to play at the "correct" speed, and only the sound effects are too fast?

What is the sound card model on your laptop? Do you have the latest drivers installed for it?

Have you tried playing the game in compatibility mode? Right click on the FA.EXE file in your install directory, and try some of the compatibility options.

About Jane's- they've been defunct for several years now. The best recent military flight sim I've played has been Lock On. I wasn't very impressed with Strike Fighters and all of the spinoffs- Wings Over Vietnam/Europe/Israel.

Zephyr

Hey, thank you for the response! My sound card is integrated and I do have the latest drivers.. the strange thing is that sometimes the voices are normal and sometimes real fast.. It will say 'Cat One!' with a normal voice, and then when I change waypoint the voice is very fast..

I tried playing with the compatibility mode set to Windows 98 and it seems to be working fine! The audio is perfect and the game runs smooth.. I don't have much time at the moment though so I'll try again once more when I get back home!

take care

It seems to be working fine now, thank you very much for your help!