Fly!
Sydney via DialUP
A yarn from the days of dialup modems, 2000.
Seeing as I had an overseas visitor coming to town and I'd arranged a flight in my mate Ken Woolfe's Cessna 172 - I thought a practice run would be in order. Now which sim?
Unfortunately Falcon 4.0 doesn't have Sydney scenery ... YET!... so I was left with Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 or FLY!.
Having read FlyingSinger's report on TerraScene 2 I was all revved up for a night of downloading and compiling - having been promised this was "easy" - hopefully easier than patching Falcon 4.0!
So, hopes high, I set off via the FLY! links page to get me some Terrascene...
Minutes later I had turned an unnatural shade of scenery green as I saw that the download was 25 MEG - that was OK - but 100 MEG for the new scenery files!!! Mmmmm - with a 56 K modem that would take me 8 hours - but my connection times out at 4 hours. I could use Gozilla to breaj up the download but I had gotten rid of that program after the "spyware" scandals early in 1999.
All was not lost however!
I headed over to Avsim.com where I searched on "Sydney" and found these files:
"Sydney Scenery.
Fly past the Olympic sites and Australian beaches. This scenery includes accurate DTED elevation data which brings the Blue Mountains west of Sydney to life. Daytime version only with ILS and runway DEX files included.
by Daniel Vickers"
5 MEG. It said 5 MEG, I found it was 10 MEG? ... no, more like 50 MEG !! Anyway this was achievable - with a bit of luck - within my 4 hour ISP session deadline. I hung up - at 27 meg! - and redialled the ISP.
This time I got a 44K connection rather than the usual 42K - hey, every bit counts! An hour and a half later - La da de dah - I am working away happily on Homesite 4.5, - listening to mp3's on Winamp - and I open Cute FTP to upload some files to the server. "Kernel 32 error" ... NO NO no...
OK I relent. Reboot and get Gozilla - at least I can resume broken dowloads again. I see it now comes with a virus checker built-in. I didn't want that... but a desultory look arond the site doesn't reveal any older versions. OK, 2.35 MEG later and I have gozilla. Now back to downoading that 50 MEG file... ...
Now Gozilla reports NO progress in getting the file and throws up a list of alternate sources. Trouble is these are much smaller files - also titled "sydney.zip".... ah wait - no - down the page there it is weighing in at 50 MEG.
But the fun's just started - Gozilla reports that the Avsim FTP doesn't support resume!
AAR-R-R-R-R-R-G-G-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-!