I believe that the version they export from in Blender will export to all versions of Max. I could be wrong, so don't immediately call me correct. This is because Blender exports the most basic version of the 3ds file and the 3ds exporter for Max will build on what the original 3ds files stored. If that makes any sense... hope it helped!

My guess would be whatever versions are currently supported by the lib3ds package:
http://lib3ds.sourceforge.net/

Seems to me that is the underlying plugin for Blender:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Scripts/3ds_export

Export to 3ds doesn't export to 3D Studio - it export to the .3DS file format, which was the one used by the very first version of 3D Studio (since version 1.0, long before it went the Max route). The format is very limited, but is very standard - and supported in all subsequent release of 3D Studio, including 3D Studio Max. It is also supported in many other packages.

Although it sounds like a neat solution, you must understand that this file format lacks many of the features that are useful today. If Blender has a COLLADA exporter (and I bet it has), I really suggest you to use this exporter to create a COLLADA file. Recent versions of 3D Studio Max has a COLLADA importer IIRC (or you can find one on teh intarweb), so you should be able to import your file in 3D Studio Max without any problem. Since COLLADA is a standardized file format - and since many application are able to handle it - it's a far better alternative to the 3DS file format.

Regards,

To Emmanuel:

What does COLLADA do differently than 3ds? I don't like 3ds because I always get errors where faces and edges are gone from my models when I export. 3ds is messy...

Out of curiousity, since you're missing faces and edges, are you sure it's not just your normals pointing the wrong way in blender? I've always had to re-calculate them prior to exporting to Ogre mesh XML's.