Anyway, to dispel a few myths.
A) the beta is approximately 45 MB, slightly bigger than Alpha 2.0. This is likely to increase, but not by much, maybe another 10 MB. If the team make seperate DLs for the Maps, Music, and Mod it will be about 25 MB for the mod, 15 MB for the music, and 5 MB for the maps (these are real rough, and I'm not near my comp with the inteam). This is all just a rough guess, and could change easily, but the team is aware of the music dl problem for narrowband fans.
B) The new effects barely hurt gameplay, and the mod is even better on 56k than the alpha! It has been real playable, even with the dragon and 5 players at once. For the record, I have a 466MHz Celeron A, with 384MB RAM (PC100) & a 3dfx Voodoo3 PCI. A crap machine . . . and it runs the beta fine.