Posted October 28, 2014
I had JUST managed to get these old games mostly working on my win764 system about 2 weeks before this release. This would normally make me angry, but my efforts did bear some amazing fruit. I discovered what had been missing from these titles for all these years-- voice command.
You see, these are sim-heavy games with LOTS of keyboard controls. Over the years, i acquired fancier and fancier joysticks, with more and more buttons and control axes on them. But the problem is that once you have both your hands on your joystick, you no longer have a hand free for the keyboard. And any controller short of the Steel Battalion Monstrosity will not have enough buttons to allow you to fully detach from the keyboard.
That's when i discovered the ONE new feature in windows that is actually very well done, and completely free (with your purchase) - Speech Recognition. If you spend a few minutes training it, it works REALLY well, and coupled with an inexpensive headset mic, I found it to be WAY more reliable than the Kinect.
Combine this with a tool for managing lots o' custom voice commands, and you can finally un-tether yourself from the keyboard, and immerse yourself into the game world. Say "I can't shake him!" to activate the WINGMAN-COVER ME command, go into your damage management sub-screen by uttering "Damage control", and my personal favorite, calling out "eyes to 6" to enable the rear-view out of your cockpit. Of course they all work with standard verbiage as well, and really make tasks like saving/recalling targets from memory a LOT easier to use.
There are a number of tools you can use to setup your voice commands. The most fully-featured and popular are:
* VAC (http://www.dwvac.com/download.html)
* VoiceAttack (http://www.voiceattack.com/).
-- I'll be happy to share my profiles for one or the other of these if anyone is interested.
* There is also the freeware GAVPI, which I have not fully tested: http://baykovr.github.io/gavpi
* For the more intrepid, you can try something like VOCOLA (http://vocola.net/v3/) to write your own macros that can be a lot more flexible and complex (i.e. you can use variables for numbers, etc), plus it's FREE.
To get even more control, I also use a joystick remapper like Pinnacle Profiler or Joy2Key or Xpadder to customize all my buttons and axis controls. I especially like how some of them can be set-up to use SHIFT commands, effectively (almost) doubling the number of buttons i have at my disposal.
You see, these are sim-heavy games with LOTS of keyboard controls. Over the years, i acquired fancier and fancier joysticks, with more and more buttons and control axes on them. But the problem is that once you have both your hands on your joystick, you no longer have a hand free for the keyboard. And any controller short of the Steel Battalion Monstrosity will not have enough buttons to allow you to fully detach from the keyboard.
That's when i discovered the ONE new feature in windows that is actually very well done, and completely free (with your purchase) - Speech Recognition. If you spend a few minutes training it, it works REALLY well, and coupled with an inexpensive headset mic, I found it to be WAY more reliable than the Kinect.
Combine this with a tool for managing lots o' custom voice commands, and you can finally un-tether yourself from the keyboard, and immerse yourself into the game world. Say "I can't shake him!" to activate the WINGMAN-COVER ME command, go into your damage management sub-screen by uttering "Damage control", and my personal favorite, calling out "eyes to 6" to enable the rear-view out of your cockpit. Of course they all work with standard verbiage as well, and really make tasks like saving/recalling targets from memory a LOT easier to use.
There are a number of tools you can use to setup your voice commands. The most fully-featured and popular are:
* VAC (http://www.dwvac.com/download.html)
* VoiceAttack (http://www.voiceattack.com/).
-- I'll be happy to share my profiles for one or the other of these if anyone is interested.
* There is also the freeware GAVPI, which I have not fully tested: http://baykovr.github.io/gavpi
* For the more intrepid, you can try something like VOCOLA (http://vocola.net/v3/) to write your own macros that can be a lot more flexible and complex (i.e. you can use variables for numbers, etc), plus it's FREE.
To get even more control, I also use a joystick remapper like Pinnacle Profiler or Joy2Key or Xpadder to customize all my buttons and axis controls. I especially like how some of them can be set-up to use SHIFT commands, effectively (almost) doubling the number of buttons i have at my disposal.
Post edited October 28, 2014 by kristenmaxwell