About
Super Mario Bros. is Nintendo's 1985 NES platform game starring Mario (and, in multiplayer, Luigi) traversing side-scrolling stages to rescue Princess Toadstool from King Koopa. TheXTech is a C++ rewrite of the SMBX 1.3 engine (originally written in Visual Basic 6), a Super Mario Bros.-inspired platformer and level-creation engine. It aims to precisely reproduce the original SMBX 1.3 engine's behavior — including many of its original bugs, aside from crash-causing ones — while running natively cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, and several consoles) without needing Wine, and using less memory and CPU than the original.
How it differs from the original
Compared to the original VB6-based SMBX 1.3, TheXTech adds an embedded mobile-style level editor (since version 1.3.6), full UTF-8 support, PNG-based graphics, a new save format called SAVX (while still able to load old saves), multi-use checkpoints, and a scripting system compatible with the older LunaDLL Autocode language — though it is binary-incompatible with LunaLua, so SMBX2 content does not work on it.
Getting started
Download a ready-to-use release package and run it the same way as SMBX, or build from source per the project's platform-specific build guides. Optional custom episodes and assets go in a per-user game folder created after the first run, and existing SMBX graphics can be mixed in after converting their images to PNG with the project's conversion tool.
History
TheXTech began as a research model to inform development of the separate Moondust Engine, and grew into a full C++ continuation of SMBX 1.3 after SMBX's source was opened; the project draws an explicit comparison to Chocolate Doom, aiming to faithfully preserve the original engine's behavior the way Moondust aims to be a more flexible, GZDoom-style toolkit.
Additional notes
- Note
- LunaLua-based content, including SMBX2 material, is not compatible, since TheXTech supports the older LunaDLL Autocode/LunaScript system but is binary-incompatible with LunaLua.