I haven't tried to run Animation Master for probably five years. In that time I've changed Macs several times. Today I tried to install it using the Classic environment. No luck; or I should say I thought I was successful at first, only to find out that A:M couldn't see the original disc through Classic when I went to run it.

I have Virtual PC 7.0.2 with Windows XP and tried to install it there. This time the app told me I had to upgrade Win NT with drivers for D3D. Only problem was, I was beyond NT (why doesn't A:M know this? Is the OS version hard coded?) and DO have D3D drivers.

As it happens, I've been using Virtual PC since version 3, when it was a Connectix product. As a result, I still had the Windows 98 install disc (full version! Microsoft has since buried it in the VPC installer, natch.) and some preconfigured PCs from the earlier versions.

So, I dragged out an old virtual machine with Win98 on it. With some (a lot!) of exception messages, VPC nonetheless converted the "machine" (a file on the Mac) to run on VPC 7, and lo and behold—A:M loaded and runs.

I don't know if this will ever help anyone else, but I figured it's worth posting to possibly save someone (not to mention me) four bills...

Which four bills are those? You know you can upgrade from any version for only $99, right? Even if you haven't upgraded since the Amiga days?

Still, cool tip.

Uh, four $25 bills?