homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II Here's what happened (Continued)

Folks,

File this under "Be careful what you want if you're going to get it".

As I predicted, I loaded BoB-WOV tonight and commenced the September 15th Battle of Britain Day Instant Action scenario. My system is not a new one so it always takes several minutes to load. When it finally did load I was amazed at the sky full of planes.

My Spitfire was high above the bombers and I rolled over to dive upon them right past the high escort. I noticed that something was terribly wrong with the sounds. Everything was happening at once and there was a lot of engine noise, chatter, zooms and gunfire and all of that sound was skipping, popping and missing. It was terrible. I have never experienced that in BoB before.

I tried to ignore it and began some of the best dogfighting I have had so far. But the skipping sound ruined the experience. Finally, after sending one of Adolph's sons into eternity, I gave up and alt-X-ed. I checked the set-up. Nothing had changed there nor should it have.

I closed BoB and re-booted the system then I re-loaded BoB. Same problem again. I tried it all again and even changed the sound driver from primary to something else. It was still a terrible mess. What had happened since I last ran BoB? I scratched my noggin raw. What had I done that in any way might deteriorate the sound in BoB? IL2 showed no sound problems nor did anything else. BoB seems to be more sensitive. What was it?

Finally I got out my log book in which I always set down every change I make on my computer and methodically narrowed it all down to one small and unlikely possibility. If you eliminate everything else then what is left, no matter how improbable it may be, must be the truth.

Because of XP's nasty little habit of choosing at random not to load all the icons in the system tray at bootup I had recently installed a tiny utility that adjusts the PC volume. Unlike the basic default XP control (the speaker icon) this one has an incremental slider and several other nice features. It is a TSR program with a tiny footprint and it's icon also sits in the system tray. That had to be causing the problem though it seemed incredible.

Sure enough when I unloaded the volume control program and ran BoB the horrid sound problem was completely gone. I'll keep the volume control because I like it but now I must remember to close that program when I run sims in the future. Maybe I'll write a macro to do it.

Gaming on a PC can be a challenge. I am that tiny bit closer to moving toward a console. I noticed that IL2 is available for the X-Box. Naturally we have a Play Station. Oh well, one day I may try something like that... maybe. I'll definately try that scenario again tomorrow night. The grand kids are sleeping now and I like the sound turned up high.