From my research into the code, I've determined that (please kill me this line is turning into such a cliche) the D3D engine upgrade translates fairly well into fully collaborative programming.
We only have to change the initialization functions and the drawing functions and the game should (in theory) adapt fine providing we keep the inputs and outputs more or less the same.
To this end, I've created the first few files of needed to do a conversion. My idea basically is that we copy the function names and work our way inward from the basic functionality expressed in the initializer functions.
If this doesn't work out then it should be easy to remove since I've isolated everything (I hope) into USE_D3D81 defines. It's not posted to the CVS until I've done a bit of work on it, but hopefully this can serve as the stepping stone we need.