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PC Magazine July, 2002 |
Remember when PC Magazine used to give away their utilities for free? Ah yes, those where the days. The earliest PC Magazine utilities were distributed as PC-BASIC programs printed up in the Utilities section, which made good typing accuracy an important skill. Eventually this was supplanted by electronic distribution via BBS and then the Internet. A lot of useful programs were thrown our way for free, and PC Magazine presumably bathed in good will and reflected glory.
Back in July, 2002, I wrote one of those free utilities for PC Magazine. CubeShow was a screensaver that featured a tumbling representation of a 3D cube, adorned with photos of your choice. Having never written a line of DirectX code in my life, it was quite an adventure, but I think I managed to produce something that worked and was popular.
Some of the more interesting problems involved with writing this utility were:
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Finding the right rotation parameters to achieve smooth animation
Figuring out how to change photos on a cube fact only when it was hidden
Keeping a photo upright as the cube rotated
A lot of fun!
Figure 1 – CubeShow in action
Sadly, PC Magazine’s free utility policy bit the dust during some corporate belt-tightening, and now it’s a for-profit operation. As a result, they are rather tight-fisted about their rights to CubeShow, so I can’t give you a copy, or even give you the source. And worse yet, when they converted their Utilities department to a store, they didn’t grandfather previously free utilities. So if you want a copy of CubeShow, you’ll either pay $7.97 for a one time download, or $19.97 for a year of unlimited downloads. Not a bad deal, and there are some good utilities on the site. If you download all 140 of them you’ll surely feel like you got your money’s worth!
1 user commented in " CubeShow "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI love CubeShow and have used it on and off for the past few years.
This year I expanded my system and how have a dual monitor setup (horizontal span).
I’ve noticed that CubeShow only works on the primary monitor (in my case the left), the other monitor remains up with the image it last had.
Looking at the code I’m pretty sure that the problem lies with DXGraphics.cpp and in particular GetAdapterDisplayMode().
Does anybody have any idea on how to get this call expanded so that CubeShow will use both monitors (or at least blank the secondary monitor)?
Cheers!
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