You, like me, may have been a bit disappointed with just three ATC voices in FS2002 (two male, one female). If that is the case, here's the way to increase the different voices up to ten (seven male, three female). If you already enjoy those ten voices you can quit reading now, of course. (I believe that if you did a full install of FS2002 you will have the ten voices, otherwise you will have only the three.)

Moving up to ten voices makes a big difference in the realism of the ATC experience. No longer will you hear your pilot voice talking back to you in the form of a controller. No longer will the lady Cessna pilot and the lady controller sound like twin sisters. (One of the new female voices, by the way, is quite alluring.)

If you are unsure about which set you have, you can do either of two things. Have a look into your FS2002 folder, sub-folder Sounds (FS2002\SOUNDS). Find the file named USEnglishSmall.gvp or USEnglishBig.gvp. The small one is 52 million bytes, the big one is 182 million bytes. I assume it is clear which one contains the ten voices. Or, while you are in FS2002, go to the Options menu/Settings/ATC. There you will find a scroll box providing the selection of your pilot voice, and you will quickly see what you have available.

OK... you have the small one and want the big one. What do we do about it? First, make sure you have enough room for a 180 meg file on your hard drive! (Be sure to leave plenty of room for other things that go on -- don't push.) Now, get out your Disk #1 CD that came with FS2002 and have a look at its contents. You will see a file named 10VOICES.CAB. The contents of this CAB file (a Zip-like compressed file) is USEnglishBig.gvp. You must now Unzip this file (using WinZip or whatever you use) into your FS2002\SOUNDS folder. It has a predetermined path to DATA\SOUND, so if you permit that path to be used you will end up with the big file in FS2002\SOUND\DATA\SOUND. If so, just drag/move it into the FS2002\SOUND folder.

Now we have both the big and the small files in our SOUND folder. We don't want that, so send the small one (USEnglishSmall.gvp) to the Recycle Bin for the time being. That will hide it from view, so to speak, without deleting it entirely.

That's all. Go into FS2002 and experience all the new voices. When you are satisfied that all is well, and it should be, you can safely delete the small voice file from the Recycle Bin and rid your hard drive of 50 megs.

If for some reason you want (or need) to reverse this process, follow the above instructions except that you will unzip the file 3VOICES.CAB from the Disk #1 CD and send USEnglishBig.gvp to the Recycle Bin.

NOTE: When I mention your FS2002 folder I refer to the folder in which the FS2002.exe file resides. Your primary Flightsim folder may have a name different from FS2002.

Happy Flying!

Robert Seitz