Super MegaZeux

Super MegaZeux
Author	MadBrain, Akwende, Exophase
Company	n/a
Release Date	n/a
Genre	MegaZeux Fork, regular feature since 2.69b
Download	No link available.

SMZX Mode is the name for an alternative graphics mode accessible through MegaZeux. Its first mode (SMZX Mode 1) was first introduced by MadBrain in a fork of 2.51s3.2; this original version was referred to as Super MegaZeux 100 Alpha (smzx100a). It relied on a little-documented text mode supported almost exclusively by nVidia and ATi chipsets. SMZX Mode 1 was induced into MZXAk, only to be removed in 2.60. SMZX only returned on the release of MZX 2.69, sporting the original mode plus the more advanced Mode 2. Mode 3 was introduced in 2.80, since it did not correlate to an actual hardware text mode and MZX no longer actually used text mode.

In the most recent versions of MegaZeux, SMZX Mode can be accessed by setting the SMZX_MODE counter to 1, 2, or 3. In the editor, one can change SMZX Mode temporarily in the editor by pressing F11.

As of MegaZeux 2.84c, the Super MegaZeux modes do not leave room in the palette for the reserved UI colors, and thus the UI will borrow the game's colors. This results in the UI palette looking corrupted, especially in SMZX Mode 3.

How It Works

SMZX Mode halves the horizontal screen resolution in favor of adding two colors per character, effectively making a color palette of 256 unique colors.

Each pixel in SMZX can be either color I (represented in MZX mode as two 'off' chars), color II ('on' and 'off), color III ('off' and 'on') ad color IV (both 'on').

SMZX Mode 1

SMZX Mode 1, the original mode, generates two new palette colors as intermediates of the two normal-mode colors specified by the palette. This is the simplest Super MegaZeux mode to use, and is used in conjunction with a standard 16 color MZX palette. The example below uses the default palette for simplicity.

Palette color	Derived by	Example (c4F)
Color I	Background of specified palette	:: 42, 0, 0
Color II	1/3 between BG and FG colors	:: 49, 21, 21
Color III	2/3 between BG and FG colors	:: 56, 42, 42
Color IV	Foreground of specified palette	:: 63, 63, 63

SMZX Mode 2

SMZX Mode 2 was the first to allow 4 colors per character that the user had full control over. It uses the same color matrix as SMZX Mode 1, but instead of automatically generating the new colors off of a standard 16 color palette, it references a user-defined 256 color palette to find the colors. All colors are defined in pairs of 2 hex digits, represented below by 0xNN. Given the same example palette as before, c4F, the colors are referenced as such:

Palette color	Derived by	Example (c4F)
Color I	Uses the background color for both hex digits	:: Color 0x44 (68 decimal)
Color II	Uses the FG for the most significant hex digit and the BG for the least significant hex digit	:: Color 0xF4 (244 decimal)
Color III	Uses the BG for the most significant hex digit and the FG fore the least significant hex digit	:: Color 0x4F (79 decimal)
Color IV	Uses the foreground color for both hex digits	:: Color 0xFF (255 decimal)

If the color indexes for colors II and III seem backwards to experienced programmers, it is not a mistake; this is how they actually are.

SMZX Mode 3

SMZX Mode 3, which was added with the SDL port, uses a palette of 256 separate colors as opposed to 16 foreground and 16 background colors (each color, in hex, is a 2-digit pair consisting of the background color and the foreground color) Characters can access these as following:

Palette Color	Derived by	Example (c4F)
Color I	The color in the palette specified by cXX	:: Color 0x4F (79 decimal)
Color II	Color I plus 1	:: Color 0x50 (80 decimal)
Color III	Color I plus 2	:: Color 0x51 (81 decimal)
Color IV	Color I plus 3	:: Color 0x52 (82 decimal)

hence yielding a set of 64 unique color palettes. The colors wrap around, so a character set to color 255 (0xFF) will use color 0 for color II, etc.

Notable games that use SMZX mode

• & by Lancer-X
• Celestial Altar by Lancer-X
• Ultima IV (port) by Lancer-X
• Bloodlands by Maxim uses Mode 1 in a novel way: to blur the screen when the player takes damage.
• Akwende's Tetris, the pack-in game included with MZXak 1.0 and above
• Kaboink! by Logicow
• Hackers Can Turn Your Computer into a Bomb!
• Murder on the Yellow Express