encse / rubik-dos

Retro programming. Rubik's cube for MS-DOS

The Rubik's cube was one of my favorite toys as a child, and writing an animated 3D cube was my dream project at the age of 18.

This repo shows the result of that effort.

Online demo here.

The code was written in Borland C++ (mostly C) using an old 5x86 machine.

I found the archives in 2021 and made it available in DOSBox.

Developing, building, playing around

I use a mac these days, so the scripts work on the mac only... You need to have node and npm installed. If you want to play with the source code, put dosbox.app in the root of the repository.

- npm run build:     creates a rubik.zip file in the public folder.
- npm run dosbox:    opens DOSBox with Borland C++ and Norton Commander installed.

To build rubik.exe:

- start DOSBox
- start the IDE with "BC" in C:\
- open C:\RUBIK\RUBIK.PRJ
- build with F9

You need to exit the IDE and run the .exe from the BIN directory.

Whatever is in the src directory, it doesn't reflect the author's view of professional software development. It's more like a junior's desperate effort to create something moderately complicated.

Hey, all of us had to start somewhere...

Copyright: I know that I shouldn't... but the whole devenv is checked in with the source code. How on Earth am I supposed to find the Borland C++ compiler 10 years from now afterall? And the same goes for Norton Commander... That's how things were working in 1998, let's just conserve it for the future.