Jane's ATF: Advanced Tactical Fighters

This page is rather stubbly and could use some expansion. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue this article?

Jane's ATF: Advanced Tactical Fighters is "sim-lite" game for MS-DOS. The second full release in a series that began in 1994 with Jane's US Navy Fighters, Jane's ATF diverges from its predecessor by focusing on modern and then-future and experimental aircraft. An expansion, NATO Fighters, added a third campaign and even more aircraft, which was compiled into Jane's ATF Gold for Windows in 1997. Jane's ATF Gold would go on to have its own content bundled with Jane's US Navy Fighters 97 in the same year, under the title Jane's Fighters Anthology.

The series was notable for its large variety of flyable aircraft (63 in Jane's ATF alone), along with a rich mission editor and robust multiplayer options, including serial, dial-up, and lobby-based LAN play via IPX/SPX (later TCP/IP).

Unused Track#

To do: There are a few other tracks I don't recognize in here that may either be rarely played, never fully played, or entirely unused. AIR062 through AIR067 are good candidates. Many tracks in-game only play in short clips, so there may be a lot of "unused" complete tracks to stitch together.

The file 4B.LIB (prepended as ATF_4B.LIB in ATF Gold for unknown reasons) is the container for all the "digital music" in the game, which is broken up into roughly 30-second or 60-second chunks. When extracted using a tool like Fighters Codex, there are 100 files labelled AIR003.11K through AIR127.11K, which are all 11kHz mono 8-bit unsigned PCM clips. Alternatively, because the files are simple uncompressed containers, it is possible to import 4B.LIB as "raw data" in Audacity or a similar audio editing tool, specifying encoding as Unsigned 8-bit PCM, 11025Hz mono.

Inside 4B.LIB, several clips comprising what appears to be an unused track can be found in files named AIR052.11K, AIR053.11K, AIR054.11K, AIR055.11K, and AIR057.11K (there is no AIR056). The track can also be found with Audacity starting at 23:08.

It's likely this track was removed from the rotation because the quite lively guitars also get quite crunchy at 11kHz.

AIR052 - Digital

Because digial music is an optional component on installation ("Full Install"), there is a "backup" MIDI soundtrack ("Minimal Install") that lives in 2.LIB as a collection of .XMI files of the same names as the digital clips. The MIDI soundtrack is, however, not a rendition of the digial music tracks, but its own thing entirely. The MIDI clips corresponding to the unused digital track therefore sound nothing like the digital version. It's a real tonal shift.

AIR052 - MIDI