I think its a very generous offer and would create some excellent large maps. For those people who have older machines then they could map it in inkscape and post the inkscape file over or create a PDF from it and send that.

You could make up the map in bits and stitch them together too. Although the image parts in Gimp might be large the final single layer ought to be of the fraction of 70 odd Mb kind of size - small enough that a stitching program ought not to barf.

I agree that it would limit the field of entries tho but it would make for an interesting challenge.

Just to add to the Ram stick thing. If you have a 32 bit machine then your pretty much limited to about 3.5Gb of physical Ram. Go 64bit, you know it makes sense !!!