Heh, as a poor student I scrounged enough for a 386sx, then later bought a non-Intel coprocessor, cyrix I think. It had 90 bits of intermediate precision (instead of Intel's 80) if you kept values on the stack. I think I managed to keep almost the entire mandelbrot calc on the stack.

i rocked a 286 with the Weitek? was it? FPU that was almost but not quite an 80287 and yet did some cool stuff nothing else did. That counted as worth it then, too. In the OP situation, all the more so.