CompuServe Messages

No offense was taken- I was just confused by your reply, that's all. In fact, you've been very helpful with information, so if I haven't thanked you before, let me take this moment to thank you now! 🙂 I think my wording of my original message was faulty. My exact words were: "1) Borrow a friend who's a student full time". What I intended it to mean was literally to use my friend to make the purchase on my behalf to save the $$$, not "borrow FROM a friend". Sorry for the confusion there. The parallel port solution, IMO, is perhaps the best solution to the copy protection problem. Since I don't pirate software, I actually don't believe much in copy protection, but I know some people do. (If I were a SW pirate, I never would have bothered coming to this forum to see what my options were vs. spending $3000 for 3DS- instead I'd be searching for a pirate's BBS- and I do know a few- to D/L the already cracked version for free + LD phone charges 🙂 ). Piracy is a long time and overly discussed issue, so I don't want to get into it, though. 🙂 I would hope you could get decent performance from 3DS with around 8-16 Mb of RAM and a 486/25 (and plenty of IDE hard drive space). (I actually have a 386/40, but may upgrade my motherboard soon- 486/33 MB's are around $600 in this area.) Does 3DS support the Sierra RAMDAC hicolor (15-bit color) chip? In addition, I presume it can render 24 bit images on HW that can't display 24 bit color. Thanks again, -Tom P.S. It's so difficult and expensive to have fun these days. 🙂