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I’m in the process of writing a few little ZX development tools. Nothing special, just some stuff to “ease” the process of writing ZX software. Anyway, while looking through some of my backlog of hacked-together apps I thought I’d upload a copy of zxoom. It was written initially as a “proof-of-concept” piece for the Windows OS. I was experimenting with capturing mouse and keyboard events, and thought I’d write one of those annoying “zoom your cursor” applications. Just to see if I could.

Anyway, I added some image-processing to the app, and “zxoom” was born. At the moment you can just tweak the display (various levels of magnification, various “grey” levels, and a psuedo-dither mode). These are combined into one menu item called “Fake Chunkmode”. If you’ve ever seen a ZX Spectrum demo of the GOA mold, you’ll know what chunkmode is… it’s a way of faking greyscales by using dithered bitmaps. The upshot of adding this mode to zxoom is that you can hover your cursor over something and see what it would look like in chunkmode on a ZX. It even supports animation, so you can watch movies in chunkmode. How groovy is that!? Exactly. It’s very groovy. Very groovy indeed.