In the real world, you wouldn't think about leaving the ground in an aircraft if your radio wasn't working, much less go on a combat mission. Yet here we are in the online simulation world doing it all the time. Yes, we can peck words out on the keyboard to our wingmen and teammates, but this is at best a less-than-perfect solution to the basic problem of team communications.

It was 1918 before the RFC (Royal Flying Corps) got its first radios. They allowed the skipper to broadcast to the rest of the wing, but their long antennae (trailed out the back of the plane) had to be retrieved as soon as they reached patrol altitude for fear of having it caught by a propellor during a dogfight.

Of course, radios have come a long way since then and have long been a basic component of aerial warfare. So where are we today in the online simulations environment? Still pecking on the keyboard whenever we're not heavily committed to the fight. So really our methods of communication today are comparable to those available back in 1918. When things get really hot, you simply can't afford to take your hands off the controls and start trying to type a message to your buddy - No matter how bad you might need his assistance!

Now, with the advent of the "Internet telephone" we no longer have to suffer our fates quietly. For about the last six months, various groups, squadrons, and individuals who play multi-player sims on the Internet have been playing around and trying to apply this new technology to their respective environments.

My multiplayer sim of choice is Fighter Ace, where I belong to a virtual squadron, Le Musketeer Escadrille. We usually fly in an "arena" where there are up to thirty planes in the air at the same time. This can get pretty hectic at times and it's very hard to maintain a good degree of SA (Situational Awareness). Sometimes it can get extemely frustrating.

For instance, when you have two enemy aircraft on your tail, you are diving for home and your wingman is nowhere to be seen. You know he's there somewhere, but this is no time to take your hands off the controls and type a message. You're too busy jinking your aircraft and trying to keep out of the enemy's stream of bullets. You're thinking, "Where is that *&^%#@% wingman! I wish to heck I had some way of getting his attention over here!"

This scenario is played out daily on the multiplayer flight simulation servers all over the world. So when the Internet telephones showed up, it seemed natural to do a little experimenting with them for our virtual cockpits. As it turned out, at just about the same time a net pilot named Paul "Wazoo" Wasserman had had the same idea and was doing some testing of his own.

He had found a little program called SpeakFreely that he successfully used with his Longbow 2 squadron in multi player. I mention this because a lot of the people who are using voice comms at present are doing so because of the excellent research he did and - in true netizen fashion - shared with the rest of us in the from of an FAQ he wrote.

Anyway, depending on what you are flying you CAN run voice comms now. Right up front I must add there are a bunch of provisos, and mostly that is what this article is about. Hopefully I can help steer you around some of the pitfalls you are likely to encounter if you are adventurous enough to want to try "Vox Comms" in the first place.

Warning: This is probably not for the faint of heart. It's very unlikely that you will damage any hardware fooling around with this, but your system software (Win95) could very easily get buggered up. So if you are not comfortable with this eventuality, then either forget it or have a professional do it.

Type "A" personalities, please proceed directly to the end of this document.

There are, at present two ways I know of to do voice, and they are both hardware solutions. One way is the two sound card method, probably the least expensive but most time consuming and potentially frustrating. The second way is the one card PCI 3d card, this is defiantly my preferred method, even though the two card scenario does have some advantages over it.

The first thing you have to know is what your system is capable of. For the two card method, you will need an extra ISA or PCI card slot on the computer's motherboard.

Those are the basic requirements. Once you have established that you do have an extra slot or slots you will need the appropriate card for it, PCI or ISA full duplex, if you have both I'd recommend going with the PCI. Either can be had for about $20 if you look around a bit. And you will need a headset with boom microphone. If possible you will want the noise canceling type, but this is not required and I use a $10 headset with boom mic that seems to work just fine as long as you tune your software correctly.

Something that I have learned through hands on experience, is that whatever types of cards you have, you should probably have at least one Sound Blaster brand card as they seem to have more IRQs and DMA's available than most cheap SB clones. And they are more flexible overall for these settings. So rule of thumb is to have at least one good card for your default or main sound card.

In addition, you will want to install it and have Windows recognize it first. Only then will you want to put in the other card. This is not a hard and fast rule though, because if the cheap card has only one IRQ to use it may be taken by the default card so you may have to put that one in first instead.

Once you have managed to get the two cards recognized by Win95, you will want to go to the control panel under the System icon, in Device manager, and look for conflicts. You will have at least one, there will be two game ports (Joystick plugins) one will be automatically disabled by Win 95 already but it is better to go in to Sound, Video and Game Controllers and double click on whichever one has the red "X" on it.

This will bring up the Properties dialog box and you should check the small window where it says, "Disable in this hardware profile", the other box will be checked by default, you can leave it or not, doesn't really matter unless you have more than one hardware profile.

Control panel | System | Device manager | Sound, Video, and Game Controllers is where you will do most of your trouble shooting if you need to.

Click to continue . . .

Once you have the conflicts worked out here, do a restart. Next, you will want to go to Control Panel | Multimedia Properties | Audio and you should have two sound input and output devices and maybe more. Ignore any other than the drivers for the specific cards that you are using and set playback to one of the cards and record to the other. Tip - Usually you will want to use any card that provides a microphone boost or dB gain in the software for Microphone input. It can come in handy sometimes.

Once that's all setup correctly, you have to configure your software. The software that a lot of people use is a little public domain application called SpeakFreely. Source code in "C" is also available there should you care to do any hacking or customization to the software.

The nice thing about SpeakFreely is: #1 - It's free, and #2 - It's very small so it doesn't take up much of your system resources to run it. Voice quality is sometimes less than spectacular but is usually livable nonetheless.

Next, RTFM! A polite translation being, "Read the frigging manual!" But since I know you won't and you've got this far in the article I'll try to fill you in.

The single most important thing you must know about is the Speakfre.ini file (in your system directory). It's a good idea to put a shortcut to it on your desktop so you can edit it until you get it working correctly. The file is a configuration settings file for the various options that can be set in SF. Now open the file and look for the [Workarounds] heading. The top 3 lines of the section should look like this:

[Workarounds]
AudioInputDeviceID=0
AudioOutputDeviceID=0

If not, you can copy and paste the above right into it. These are the settings that allow you to specify your input (mic) and output (speaker or headphone) devices.

The "0"s can be changed to accomplish a number of things, the default 0, 0 setting will set you up with one card only (normally), whatever happens to be the default card under Win 95. But since you want to have one card for voice communication independent of your game sounds you need to set the "0"s to something else. There are only these possible combinations of settings: 0-0, 0-1, 1-0, 1-1. Just go by trial and error until you get it right. Important - for any .ini file changes to take effect you have to restart the program each time you make a change.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. The first thing you want to do when your cards are installed and you can open up SF is to get on the net and try to communicate with one of the echo servers that is set up for the purpose of allowing you to test this software. The addresses of the servers are:

echo.fourmilab.ch		Switzerland (Switzerland)
corona.itre.ncsu.edu		United States (North Carolina)
rpcp.mit.edu		United States (Massachusetts)

(You can also test from your local machine by going to Help | Local Loopback.)

At this point you might as well setup some of the some of the options in the program that seem to work well. First is the VOX feature (Hands off full duplex mode). Go to Connection | New and type or paste in one of the echo server addresses (local loop back offline) then click your mouse on the small window that comes up, to transmit a test message to the server. You should hear it echoed back to you within about ten seconds.

(Any error messages at this point will likely mean that your workarounds setting are not correct, this is easily fixed by trial and error, the one variable here is in the Multimedia settings if you try all the settings and still can't get voice to your headphones you may have to reverse the order of Input and output devices in the multimedia control panel)

Next, you will want to test VOX (auto voice activation) on the microphone. First select Options | 8-bit Audio. Then Options | Voice Activation | Monitor, another small window with a green bar should pop up. If the green bar isn't there select the other window with the mouse and touch the space bar once and you should see a message saying "Transmitting" in this window.

To test this you must be online. If you hear your voice echoed back when you speak into the mike, then you're ready. The only thing left to do is to set the VOX activation level, this is the level that the program will kick in and start transmitting your voice on the net. Usually you want to set the small red marker about 1/8" to 1/4" higher than the green bar, so it only transmits when there is sufficient volume to do so (ie. your voice as picked up by the microphone).

So there you have it. Now you should have voice communications capability over the Internet just like a telephone with SpeakFreely. Of course SpeakFreely is not the only program that will do this. I simply picked it because it is small, free, and easily available.

As far as I know, almost any of the other Internet phones available will work. The ones I tested included, MS Netmeeting 2.1, Voxphone and Intel Internet Phone. However some games are incompatible with some Internet phones, so again it's trial and error.

Here a few combinations that are known to work quite well:

FA-18 Korea and Netmeeting or SF.
Longbow 2 and SF.
Ver. 1 of Fighter Ace worked marginally well with SF.
Warbirds h2h SF or NM 2.1.
MSFS 98 works with SF.
Flying Circus and SF.
(Note - RBII on TEN does NOT seem to want to work but may on an IPX emulator network like Kali or Kahn.)

Hopefully this list will expand as I hear from others who are using sims not listed here.

Tally Ho,
Peter "Fighterjock" Waddell

For Type "A" personalities ("Instructions! I don't need no steenkin' instructions!") here's the short version: Find an available slot on your motherboard. Get a sound card and headset. Set up your favorite Internet telephone program. Try game. If it doesn't work try a different phone program until it does. That's it! Go to Part II