Yeah, MAX is a proprietary format that no other software is written to read. Somewhere along the line, 3D Studio change hands, and changed file formats; files ending in 3DS can be read an imported by most everything, and MAX can't. I've alwasy been a little surprised that no one's ever hacked the file format, because there's often a lot of good free stuff out there. Could be that it's heavily encrypted, though. Don't know why they did that with their file format, but they surely did.