Banged out all the gears for the reproduction of the original demo.  Multicolors are sadly not possible.  The 160x200 multicolor mode would be illegible.  Maybe the color map could be set based on bounding boxes from the gears, but the overlapping areas wouldn't work.  The best trick might be drawing 2 bitmaps, 1 bitmap containing just the big gear & the other bitmap containing just the small gears since they usually don't overlap.  It could toggle between bitmaps in a raster interrupt, but it would have to be a static display.

The cursor keys rotate it manually, to prove it's doing the 3D transformation.

It runs at around 2 frames every 3 seconds.  It burned 12kb.

1 thing we couldn't do 40 years ago was make crosseyed stereo pairs.  There's not enough resolution to get much depth.  There was an intriguing possibility of printing crosseyed stereo pairs on a VIC 1525.

Sadly, the magic of learning to program the commodore 64 40 years ago wasn't rediscovered.  To a modern lion, it's just another embedded system with its own goofy architecture.  There were other aspects like sprites, character sets, & sound but the mane thing young lions couldn't master was fast bitmap drawing.