Ah yes, black models normally mean you have tried to load a texture up but mistyped it. DB has an annoying `feature` at the moment where it will load up phantom images, even if they don't exist. For example:-
load image "apple.bmp",1
make object sphere 1,8,16,16
texture object 1,1
do
sync
LOOP
That will run fine and dandy, although no image called apple exists. You will get a black sphere. Normally it would flag an error and exit, but latest version of DB ignores and continues on. It is only an annoyance when you know, but if you are not aware you could spend a lot of time messing about wondering what is happening. I tend to put a "if file exists()" condition in these days just to have an error check in place. The same can be said for .jpg, but if you load in a .tga, it will flag it is missing. So obviously it's a change for certain file formats that has caused this.
http://s6.bitefight.org/c.php?uid=103081