Introduction
The Cube was a polygonal demo for Amiga that appeared as the intro for the first coverdisk of Amiga Magazine, dated July/August 1988. That issue also included an article about polygonal graphics in Assembly MC68000, written by the author of the demo, Paolo Russo, as well as the source code, meant to be processed by Metacomco's Macro Assembler.
When that historical issue was out, I was in elementary school, so I did not understand any of it. However, by reading it again now, I realized that the fundamental concepts were extremely clear and I could understand them perfectly, especially the part about the graphical macro language. So I decided to use DarkBASIC Classic and DarkBASIC Pro to make a port of that demo that would run on modern computers. I also added camera controls that the original demo lacked: my ports let you move and look around the environment with the keyboard and mouse, and even see the scene from the cube's point of view.
Download
* The package cube.zip contains two executables: Cube-classic.exe that uses Direct3D 7, and Cube-pro.exe that uses Direct3D 9.0c. They both work by moving polygonal object inside a 3D space and using functions that accept the same parameters as Paolo Russo's graphical macros.
The two executables are pretty much equivalent, except that Cube-classic.exe is made for Windows XP and below, and supports stereoscopy with nVidia's legacy 3D stereo drivers; Cube-pro.exe is made for Windows XP and above, and supports stereoscopy with modern drivers like nVidia 3D Vision, iz3d, TriDef and VorpX.
* The package cube.lha contains the original Amiga executable, the assembly source code and an icon. It is meant to be used on a real or emulated Amiga.
Download cube.zip (PC version) (2.44 MB)
Download cube.lha (Amiga version) (7.75 KB)
Would you like to develop games or make virtual environments in DarkBASIC? Don't let the first hurdles stop you. These books will teach you many things you cannot simply find with a search engine, while available examples will give you the starting material you need to experiment with, way more than you would get by asking in a forum.