Make chummy with the tech people at nearby high schools and colleges. Offer to volunteer in their labs a bit. You'll wind up getting your hands on all kinds of cool old technology stuff - old OS disks, for one.

i think the virtual machine option is probably the best. How do I go about getting Windows 98? My dad chucked out all our old operating system discs fairly recently (had no idea I had any interest in ever using them) I can't easily use torrents.

I'm almost 100% sure that's not a serial port but a parallel port. And USB parallel port adapters don't work with these devices. Vista 64-bit (and maybe even 32-bit) will enforce driver signatures, so you probably won't be able to use the giveio.sys driver or similar. (There's also userport.sys is generally considered better for XP.)

One of the many things I should do, but probably never will, is to make a bootable USB distribution based on Windows 98, 2000 or XP which contains various Gameboy tools and similar you can use for these things without installing a different OS.

Yoiu can use LSDJ demo to test.
Vista will be a problem with all that software. I recommend you installing a virtual machine on your computer and running windows 98.
Also if you have a Mac you are fucked. You shouldn't buy this at all.

I have acquired 2 Doctor GB Card 64M cards and a Bung GB XChanger MGD3 with a serial cable from a friend (I actually had a 16M one myself as a kid but can't seem to find it) and am trying to put LSDJ onto them.

I haven't actually bought LSDJ yet, because I want to make sure I can get the things working first.

What I have:

dbz-dw16.nfo
dgbmax.exe
dgbmax.ini
dgbmenu.cbc
dontread.txt
english.dlg
FILE_ID.DIZ
GIVEIOS.SYS
readme.txt
translate.zip

The above files are from 2001 so are probably outdated but most websites I have looked at won't seem to load (probably long dead) and the search function on this site isn't even returning anything for dgbmax which is concerning since I'm sure a lot of you have used this program before.

as well as lsdj3_1_9_demo.gb

can I use this LSDJ demo on the cart to see if it works? or will I need to find a commercial rom to test with before buying this? (I collect Gameboy games, so don't have any reason to pirate commercial games etc, just want to try and learn LSDJ so haven't bothered getting any roms)

I've poked around with the program a little and it seems to freeze when i try certain things, i haven't followed the instructions much yet, as I've run out of time, I just want some advice first before I go wasting more time.

PS. I am using Windows Vista, is this a problem? I've read that there are problems for this program with newer operating systems, my main computer is a Mac and doesn't have the serial ports.