MegaZeux

MegaZeux is a GCS created by Gregory Janson. It was inspired by ZZT, which Greg and other members of Software Visions had created several games for beforehand. The first version, 1.00g, was uploaded to AOL on December 4, 1994.

Features

Robotic

See also: Robotic

Robotic is MegaZeux's object-oriented programming language. Some parts of the language, as well as the concept itself, are based on ZZT's ZZT-OOP, though Robotic is much more advanced than ZZT-OOP.

History

History of MZX's development.

Spider Versions

After MegaZeux was released under the terms of the GNU GPL, Spider124 updated the source code with several useful new features and released his own version of MegaZeux, 2.51s1. Among the new features were a vastly expanded counters limit (1000, compared to 2.51's 50 counters), true mouse support, playerx/playery counters, and many bug fixes. Three more versions were released (s2, s3, and s3.1; of which 3.1 was a bug fix release) before development of MZX grew stagnant.

MadBrain took the s3.1 source and added one new feature (the bi_mesg built-in counter) and released his modifications as MZX 2.51s3.2. s3.2 was further modified with the introduction of the SMZX graphics mode (this version was released as SMZX 100 Alpha).

MZXak

Akwende released the first MZXak version, MZXak 1.0, shortly after MadBrain's SMZX alpha version. MZXak featured several additional features (some of which, like the multi-colored configuration dialogs, were determined by the community to be too useless to warrant the memory usage) including file access, robot targeting, and built-in SMZX mode. All MZXak versions included Akwende's MZX version of Tetris, which demonstrated the use of SMZX graphics.

MZXak 1.0 was pulled a few months after release from DigitalMZX due to Akwende's failure to release his source code under the terms of the GNU GPL. He eventually released the source, but not until a lot of public debate and heel-dragging. Other MZXak 1.0 controversy included forward compatibility, which led to MZXak games being playable but not necessarily functioning in MZX2.51s3.1. This broke wizdom's judging results in the 2001 DsDoZ.

MZXak 2.0 was released after much waiting, though the release sparked a fair bit of dispute due to the sudden timing with Koji's 2.60 release. MZXak 2.0 is notable for being the only code fork to completely die out.

Exophase Versions

Following the discussions about MZXak, Koji released MZX 2.60, featuring some of the same additions as MZXak. 2.61 was released shortly after, and around 2.62's release, Exophase took over development of MegaZeux. Tons of features were added in between 2.62 and 2.70 (the last version of MegaZeux in DOS) such as expressions, sprites, strings, the vlayer, MZMs, SMZX Mode 2, and many others.

MZX32

During Exophase's development of MZX for DOS, BFeely began development on MZX32, which was to be a full-featured port of MegaZeux for the Windows platform. Several alpha versions were released, most of which lacked the world editor (and all of which lacked the robotic code editor). MZX32 was generally regarded as unstable and buggy, and was deemed obsolete once Exophase began work on his SDL port. The last version of MZX32 released featured support for games created using MZX 2.69c.

SDL Port

Exophase took most of the summer of 2004 to do a update/rewrite of MegaZeux into SDL, to break some DOS limitations and to solve MegaZeux's ever-increasing compatibility issues (and to eventually expand MegaZeux onto new platforms such as Linux and the Macintosh). This included re-writing the entire Robotic editor. After intense pre-testing, MZX 2.80 was released on Aug 9 2004, with workability only intended for Windows 32 platforms. A slew of bug reports that only arises from public testing shortly followed, and Exophase quickly updated with three incremental versions in one month. Other MegaZeuxers helped in various aspects; for example, the updated sound code was mostly ajs's and mad's doing.

Each upgrade added some functionality (e.g. multi-char editor, code search, ogg support), and MegaZeux eventually resolved the various issues that prevented sucessful porting to Linux and Mac platforms.

The current version is 2.81c; Exophase has indicated that he will release 2.81d, but it is unknown when. GP2X and PSP ports are in the works for the next version, as well as increased Win9x compatibility and a few other fixes.

External Links

MZX32 Project Page (Sourceforge)