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Flight Comms version 1.35
Roger-Wilco Version Ic Beta
Fig. 5. FC Main Screen
Fig. 6. FC Config Screen
Lest you think that the big companies are taking over everything, Flight Comms is a small standalone program. It is slightly over 200K in size, writes nothing to your registry, has no '.dll' files, and works very well with many programs. Apparently the author was a Jane's F-15 fan. There is a special mode to make Flight Comms cooperate with this program. Unfortunately, CPU hogs like Jane's F/A-18, Flanker 2.0, and other recent flight simulations clobber this program.
It was not happy with Unreal Tournament so I might stay away from the first person shooters, too. The program will not minimize to the SysTray so requires a utility like TrayIt to put FC in the SysTray. Most impressive is that a single individual, not a company or a team of programmers, created this program.
Fig. 7. Roger Wilco LogoYou say you just want to talk to your buddies while simming online? You don't want to have to select from twenty features or go through a complex setup procedure? Have we got a program for you! Roger-Wilco (R-W) has been a free download since the day the first beta was released to the public. It is small in size, simple to use, and provides good quality communications when setup properly. R-W was also recently acquired by Hear Me Software. All I can say is thank you to Hear Me for not changing the name of the software when they acquired R-W. I just could not bear to say, "OK team, let's fire up Hear Me and go bomb some commies."
Why would a beta version be included in this comparison? Version Ia (0.48) has occasional problems with DirectX 7.0 and 7.0a. Several current simulations and the current crop in beta and alpha testing require DX7+. The 'beta' version of the Roger-Wilco software (0.53) has been around for a long time and proven stable enough for it to be compared to other commercially available freeware.
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