MegaZeux

MegaZeux is a game creation system (GCS) based on Tim Sweeney/Epic Megagames' classic shareware game ZZT. MegaZeux (more commonly MZX) was created in 1994 by Gregory Janson, who formed his own company, Software Visions (now defunct.) Like ZZT, MZX was released as shareware and the world editor portion of the program was included for free, allowing third parties to create their own worlds without even registering. MZX improved on ZZT in almost every aspect:

• The graphics are still text-character based, but each character's foreground and background colors are independently assignable, and the character set could be edited to change the font, as well as to change unused characters such as the tilde or non-English characters into graphic symbols such as player pictures. The color palette was also made editable in version 2.00.
• 4-channel (MZX 2.07 and under) and 32-channel (MZX 2.48b and up) MOD music was supported, as well as SAM sound effects. Other module formats such as S3M were also supported via an intermediate format, GDM. Recent versions of MZX (2.80+) support advanced module formats directly.
• The game-object programming language was heavily based on ZZT-oop, but was also heavily improved. Commands were now stored as bytecode instead of raw text, error checking was done in the editor instead of at runtime, and arithmetic commands were present. Later versions added things such as subroutines and mathematical expressions, although the nature of these additions was often unnatural due to the inability to edit the change the keywords of the language itself at the time. Robotic currently has almost no memory restraints for code or number counters.

MZX came with a default game, Caverns of Zeux. This was a sequel to an earlier Software Visions shareware game, Labrynth [sic] of Zeux, which was a side-scrolling action game about an theologian/archeologist named Vince Louis who retrieves the magical Silver Staff from the ancient Labrynth of Zeux. In Caverns, Vince has just retrieved the Staff when it emits beams of magical power and teleports him into a vast network of caverns filled with traps, puzzles, and monsters. As incentive for registration, players could purchase the other three Zeux games, Chronos Stasis, Forest Of Ruin, and Catacombs Of Zeux, all of which dealt with Vince's quest to return home.

MZX was fairly popular with the ZZT community due to its new features, and Janson stayed around with the newly-formed MZX community for a while, releasing an entirely different game, Weirdness, which utilized the immprovements made in MZX 2.00. Weirdness, as its title implies, is a bizarre adventure game about a young boy, Jace Nyglus, who wakes up one night to discover that a large object has made a crater in his backyard. Weirdness bears remarkable similarity to Ape Software's Super Nintendo classic, Earthbound, almost appearing to be a parody of it. Shortly after Weirdness's release, Janson suddenly left the community and dropped MZX entirely, releasing all his work to the public domain, including the beginnings of Weirdness II, which apparently dealt with Jace's adventures on the space cows' ship.

MZX stayed at version 2.51 for a while before various MZXers such as Spider124 took the code — which had been released under the GNU General Public License — and began to modify it. One of the first alterations was to expand the variable limit from 50 "counters" (signed 16-bit integers) to 1000, a marked improvement. Later Spider versions also added such features as mouse support. After Spider124 stopped developing MZX others jumped at the opportunity to add new features to the GCS. Following MadBrain's v2.51s3.2 release MZX development was split into two distinct branches, the Spider branch (which would later become the mainstream MZX code base) and a small, but significant, branch started by Akwende. MZX Akwende (MZXak) is noteworthy because, while introducing features such as SMZX (a text mode hack that allowed game developers to have four colors per character with the side-effect of cutting the horizontal resolution of each character in half) it did not comply with the GPL — the code was never made publically available. MZXak also found itself slammed with controversy after its release due to accusations stating that Akwende didn't actually code many of the features that were implemented in his release. During this controversy Koji released MZX v2.60, a version that included many features of MZXak v2 and did not violate the GPL. Koji followed this release up with v2.61 before Exophase took control of the main branch. Exophase's versions kept many of the prior improvements, but fixed many compatibility issues and added even more features, such as expanded string capability. Some of the most major changes came with MZX 2.65, which added several new features such as:

• Programmable sprite objects, which are drawn above the normal playing field and can be very large.
• Mathematical expression evaluation.
• Reintroduced SMZX, which halved horizontal resolution to achieve two-bit color, so that up to four colors could be used in one character.

Later versions such as 2.68 added various new improvements, but the biggest change came with version 2.80, a Windows-native version that used the SDL library to eliminate hardware compatibility issues. 2.80g is the current version of MZX, and Exophase is still at work on improving MZX's capabilities. The latest version of MZX can be found at DigitalMZX. A far more extensive amount of information on MZX can be found at its own Wiki page, hosted on (SourceForge).