Setting up Fly!II on a Mac

[zfehr 1]

There are wonderful walk throughs by Ken Salter for Fly!II in the PC version. I have used these guides to set up Fly!II on my PC but my father has an iMac and has purchased Fly!II for it, he also got the CH usb yoke and pedals. I am going to help set his system up and was wondering if some of the files suggested by Mr. Salter would work or have Mac versions... for example, Jures cloud sets, the sky color files, vfr ocean, FSBuild, InfoMetar, Autoweather. Anyone who has already set up Fly!II on a Mac and would be willing to share I would really appreciate the help. I have taken the better part of a month getting my PC to where it is now and would like to leave my Dad flying and not fiddling with various headaches.Thanks in advance,Zane

[Guest Allan Jones]

HI Zane,Most of the set-up is pretty simple. Unless your dad's iMac is "smoking' hot" in the performance (like a G4 FP), and he has OSX, you'll likely get best FlyII performance under OS9.First, turn off Virtual Memory if possible. I figure you need a min of 288MB physical RAM to run with VM off. VM really drags FlyII down unless you have VM targeted to an empty disk/partition.Don't even try running in 16-bit color. It looks terrible and doesn't help rates. If you have a newer iMac with an nVidea card, 16-bit might work. Apparently, ATI cards don't like 16-bit color.As for add-ons, I think all scenery files work without conversion. Aircraft are "good-to-go" too, unless they have PC-specific dll files. Example, the ROTW P51 Mustang doesn't run on the Mac (yet), but they have a Socata TBM700 with Mac dlls. Mac and PC dlls are different. Fortunately, few a/c cause this.Any Fly utility that has the .exe extent is not going to work. That's a Windows executable so the Mac sees it as a text file, not an app.The patch is optional in my book. It fixed some bigs but induced a few new ones. Either is fine for most flying. I use both. However, if you want to try running under X, I recommend applying the patch.Something about FlyII is not clocking to the slower Mac system bus, so don't expect awesome rates. However, if you do get awsome rates, post it here in big letters and tell us what you did!Just about every game/sim I have that has a PC equivalent runs at rates comparable to a similarly equipped PC. Except FlyII. Over on the Apple forums, we talked about this and some programmer said that Mac versions of PC games were usually adjusted in the software to pace to the slower Mac bis speeds without whacking rates.I'm home at lunch right now and have been up since 3AM, so my brain has times out on me. See how it goes and I'll think of other tips.

[zfehr 1]

Thank you Allan,I will be giving it a go this weekend. The TBM is a must have on my father's list. We got to fly one in 1996 and he still talks about it. He also logged over 1,000 hours in the Navajo Chieftan he used to own. I'm afraid he's not going to be happy with the performance of the Fly!II version. 4 passengers and half fuel we used to see 3,000fpm taking off out of Columbia CA for a short while, the sim won't do this. In looking over the downloads it appears that Jure's sky and cloud files will work. I would like to find a FSBuild type program that will operate on his Mac... any tips or links would be appreciated. I've been using FSBuild for Fly (I bought FSNavigator for FS98/2k/2k2) and really like it. I will post how it goes and if any glitches get in the way. BTW his Mac is the iMac that came out just before the latest version (case change with flat screen) and OSX... have to check if it is 10.2Zane

[Guest Paul Brooks]

Hi Zane I have also just bought a new Mac and initially had similar problems to some of the other Mac users of FlyII, getting "cannot open system pod etc", and I discovered that when you patch to the last patch (2.50.4 or something) that you must copy the files within the folder i.e. data, system, etc, and paste into the original FlyII folder, which will replace the old files Do not replace the original folder with the one from the patch.Since I did this Fly has run really well giving me about 20-30 fps with clouds etc.Hope this helps you to enjoy Fly as much as I do.Paul

[zfehr 1]

Just a report that the install went fine. Loaded the patch and ROTW's TBM... all running fine. Quick question, how come the Mac version came with THREE CD's and a manual? Us poor PC users have had to download enormous files to patch our systems up and didn't come with anywhere near all these charts! I am curious if there is a way to use all of those charts in the PC version. I already tried putting CD #3 into my PC... won't read it :( I do have a zip-drive and if the files are identical in both versions I could zip up his map folder and put it into my computer. If anyone has tried this and especially if you've done it successfully, please let me know.Zane