This is a guide to setting up custom sound within A-10 Attack! There are mods for enhanced stereo sound and for radio chatter during missions.
The custom sound mods are only available at Steve's HOG HEAVEN, under the 'Better Sounds' section. This page houses a large set of A-10 Attack! and A-10 Cuba resources created and curated by Steve Russillo. Without Steve's page we very likely would have lost these mods and the extensive info Steve has collected. So a huge thankyou to Steve.
The mods are exclusive, one or the other can be installed but not both, due to them both replacing the same original sound resources. They are only compatible with A-10 Attack! and the Mac version of A-10 Cuba.
Prerequisites
In order to install the sounds we'll need an old Mac developer tool, ResEdit. It's basically an editor for creating and editing the resources that make up a Mac application. For example, it can be used for editing the icons and menus that make up an application's GUI. In this case it'll be used to change the sound resources used by A-10 Attack!
We'll need the sound mods themselves from Steve's HOG HEAVEN. The mods are:
Custom Stereo Sounds (1.4MB)
Radio Chatter Sounds (3.3MB)
You'll need to download one or both from Steve's page.
Installing ResEdit
I'd recommend ResEdit v2.1.3 it seemed to work reasonably well. The version I found was a compressed archive .sit which expanded into a disk image. Opening the disk image revealed a ResEdit folder that just needed to be copied to hard disk.
Preparation
Prior to making any changes it is very strongly recommended to take a copy of the original unmodified A-10 Attack! application and store it in another folder for safe keeping. If anything goes wrong you can restore this unmodified version.
Installing a sound mod
The sound mods are distributed as a compressed archive .sit file, so use StuffIt Expander to un-compress it, into a mod folder. The process is identical for each sound mod:
Open the folder and open the resource file with ResEdit, there should be a single snd resource.
Use ResEdit and open the A-10 Attack! 1.5 application. This should open a window showing all the resources used by A-10 Attack! One of these resources will be a snd resource.
Drag and drop doesn't work so select the snd sound resource in the sound mod window and go to Edit and Copy.
Select the A-10 Attack! window and selected Edit and Paste.
ResEdit will ask if you want to replace resources with the same id. Select Yes.
If you encounter an error at this point (and I did) don't panic. For some reason not all the sounds copy across. This might be due to emulation or some other reason but it's very easy to fix, we just have to copy some of the sounds across manually:
Double click on the sound mod snd resource to open the sound list in the mod. There should be a list of sounds with id's running from 10000 to 10041.
Double click on the sound mod snd resource to open the sound list in the A-10 Attack! app. Again there should be a list of sounds with id's running from 10000 to 10041.
If the sound file size is smaller or an id is missing in the A-10 Attack! sound list. Then we need to copy that sound from the sound mod list and into the A-10 Attack! list.
Highlight the sound to copy in the sound mod list and select Edit and Copy.
Select the A-10 Attack sound list window and select Edit and Paste.
ResEdit will ask if you want to replace resources with the same id. Select Yes.
Continue until all id are present the all the sounds are the same size as the sound mod size.
To finish up:
Select the A-10 Attack! resource window and select File and Save.
Close ResEdit.
You're ready to play with your enhanced sounds!
References
Better Sounds section of Steve's HOG HEAVEN