...seems a little illogical that you are saying that current B3D should be forced to wait till DX7 dies off before they are allowed a graphics API update?!?!
No i wasnt, i was saying that BMax+Max3D will be the new B3D. If DX7 (ever) gets dropped although i doubt it will for a very long time yet and by then i suspect some kind of emulator will be available instead.
If this ever happened, programs will need to be re-coded in it (as they would if B3D ever got rewritten for DX10/OGL as it would undoubtedly be some big differences too)
When Max3D is released i propose a community project to create an auto syntax converter to take some of the pain away from conversion. By this i mean to smart replace all the symbolic differences, ignore strings / comments, insert lists for types, that kind of thing.
Of course something like this would never work properly with strict (unless it could be made to intelligently declare everything too), but i did something similar at a very basic level on my on-ice jetpac project from B3d to minib3d and it worked quite well and saved a lot of conversion time. The only problems i had were with some of the 2d stuff which i am going to remake using a 3D overlay.