Crisis over, I found the disk
For those of you might be inquiring about Palette v4,
here's what I've learned over the years:
[1] Security dongle
Of course, v4 requires a security dongle. This must attach to a parallel
port (old printer port). They ceased putting parallel ports on PCs years ago.
My research indicates that a USB-to-parallel adapter won't work. There's
some incompatibility with the timing or something that messes things up.
I bought a parallel port PCI card and plugging it into my desktop. This worked,
but I think the driver had a problem because it caused the PC to crash randomly.
[2] Serial port
And they've quit putting the old-fashioned serial ports on PCs too. But in this
case a USB-to-serial adapter, which you can get for about $10, works just fine.
[3] Install disk and patch
You can copy over the files from the install disk into a folder and install from the
files in the folder instead of from the disk. (You better believe I've got a copy on
my hard drive now!)
There's a patch out for v4 that you MUST have in order for this s/w to work.
[4] Compatibility
I don't know, I've only ever run it on Windows 98 and XP (all SP's of XP).
I hear that it won't run on Windows 7, but I don't know if that was 32 or 64 bit or both.
Of course, you won't find many Windows 7 PCs that have an old-fashioned parallel
port.
[5] Other thoughts
Since I have such a big investment in this, I wound up buying an old laptop
dedicated to running Palette v4 exclusively. I put the whole kit in a closet when not
uusign it.