I seem to have 2 issues running the game properly at the moment. Neither are game breaking per se so much as just annoying.

The cutscenes are clearly quieter then the rest of the game. I'm having to jack up my speakers to hear a thing, and the subtitles don't seem to want to show when I have them toggled. It's even more obvious if you come to a decision point as the voice over for the options are at normal game volume.

In mission, I have a slightly different issue. The game seems to read my joystick fairly oddly, and is very jittery. Especially if I'm only trying to move the ship a little bit, I may end up going in the opposite direction. I just finished playing Prophecy as well as Freespace, and had no joystick issues there, so as far as I can tell it's something with how this game is picking it up.

Any suggestions for either? My OS is Win 8.1 (unfortunately), and my joystick is a Mad Catz Cyborg Flight Stick V1 http://www.cyborggaming.com/prod/v1stick.htm

Make sure you install the AC3 filter, that will fix the audio problem. Not sure on the joystick though

I have the exact same issue with my joystick. I searched and searched but haven't found any mention of the same weird behaviour, nor did my own thread get any replies. I just happened to come back here months later to see if there happened to be anything about it.

I got up to the mission where you need to go solo and take out some stuff on a planet, but it's almost impossible to shoot even one of the two enemies that show up early on because I simply cannot aim at them for more than a quarter of a second before they've moved a tiny bit, which I can't adjust for(like you said, it'll jump in the exact opposite direction before moving, or it'll just jump way past where it should have gone).

That was October last year and I haven't touched the game since, which is a real shame.

Same problems here and cannot find solution. I bought this game since when I was a child I din't know much english and i was not understanding the story.
Now i can understand english, but 'm not too trained with the spoken language, so I thought subtitles can help me understand, but no luck on letting them go...

I tried to use mouse as aiming device, but it's not working good...
I know the game was really cheap, but i'm a little disappointed about that things...