Sneak Preview....

    I didn't want to keep you guys hanging on too much longer,
    but I'm not quite ready for prime time.  This zip archive
    contains these files:

    FTD files I produced (I'd edited a few when inserting
    navigation aids for exploring.)  All of these were created by
    the program.  Look at the southwest-most portion of the area. 
    It shows the Sangre de Cristo mountain range just north of
    the Great Sand Dunes National Monument.  This is the first
    area I was able to build when the program first started
    running.

    DEM2FST.TXT is the write-up.  It should give you enough
    information to start research.  This is the piece I need to
    complete and should be able to do so soon.
    
    DEM2FST.BAS is the Qbasic code.  I don't own a complier, but
    I do have (and used) the interactive/interpretive environment
    that should be on most standard MSDOS installations of V5 or
    later.  Most of the parameters you would use will have to be
    edited into the source code.  I purposely avoided doing
    interface engineering because I wanted to produce terrain.
    However, there are few changes you would have to make to
    process a similar area elsewhere.  A few more changes would
    have to be made to do a larger/smaller/differently shaped
    area.

    AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files I used to run the machine
    during conversion.  I own a machine with 4MB memory, and I
    could reduce the machine I/O (beating up on my hard drive) by
    booting up with a RAMDRIVE.  That's the D:\ drive in the
    program.

    SAMPLE.DEM is a portion of a DEM file that's been downloaded
    from the USGS and processed on a UNIX system.  The DEMS are
    stored by USGS as a binary file (that is to say, without
    record delimiters).  The DEMS need to have record delimiters
    added as recommended by the USGS for this program to work.
    With the vertical point separation I could calculate, I
    verified the approximate elevations on a topographic map I
    have of Colorado.
