I went to several websites to find Dark Basic and eventually Dark Basic Pro.
One day my brother came from school with a floppy disk with a freeware game inside. We played around with it then we decide to find the website it came from. We found eventually found a website containing old freeware and shareware games. We downloaded a Galaga clone there. After that we decide to find the company that made that game. We did a google search, and we ended up in a website with old shareware. Not in that website there were links to other websites, so we visited one. Now in that website there was a link to game making resources. I just can't remember what are the URL's fro those websites.
Any way we ended up in http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html which has a ton of links to game making resources. Now one of them leads to the Dark Basic website, the description was “BASIC language that lets you create fast full-screen DirectX and Direct3D games with incredible ease. You can write a 3D game in minutes!", so I went "WOW", so I checked it out. There, I found a link to the Dark Basic Professional website.
At that time DBP was still very new. I tried out to try the trial version but, my old computer does not have direct x 8 and has sub par hardware. So I just read around the DBP website. One of the things I read was DBP's shader support. That's the first time I found out about shaders. I did some research around the internet and I found out about the existence of Nvidia and ATI. I looked at their cards but they were expensive and I heard that Geforce 4 MX has no shader support.
Eventually, we bought a new computer. It's not very powerful, but its performance is light years away from my old one. Around that time I found out about the Geforce FX, Nforce 2 and Athlon XP, very nice hardware but not very pricey. I was confident that DBP can run on this one.
One day my uncle visited us, (he works at the U.S.) and he wanted to give me a gift and I asked for a DBP!
Whew, that was long.
System: AMD Athlon XP 2200+, nForce 2 ultra 400, 256 MB PC-2700 RAM, 40 GB 7200 Hard Drive, Geforce FX 5200 128 MB (64-bit), 56K modem