I'd like to experiment with normal mapping for my newer models. But I have Max 4.2 and can't afford the $4000 price tag for max7.

Are there any plug-ins and so forth for Max4 that will allow the same thing?

Slyrr

http://www.soclab.bth.se/practices/orb.html

All you need independant of max.

what you won't be able to do is to view your normalmaps in max's viewport nor render them. unfortunately there has never been a normal map plugin nor a hardware shader been compiled for this release.

apart from that, there's not much of a restriction. i've been using this version to create hi- and low-rez models to bake maps in ORB, you could also try nvidia's melody.
for viewing the normal maps, you'D need either some game editor or a standalone app, like crytek's polybump viewer or any DX-shader creation toolkit.

I'll give those a try - thanks. My computer slows to a crawl with anything over 10000 polys