New features (deliberate additions beyond the original)

Intentional enhancements this port adds on top of faithful Pokémon Red behavior. They have no Game Boy equivalent and are kept by design. Genuine divergences from the original (things still missing, wrong, or approximated) live in docs/known-differences.md; faithfully-ported behavior is in docs/behavior-porting-notes.md.

Survey zoom

The mouse wheel (or -/=), the Options ZOOM row, or hotkey 4 zooms the overworld between 1 pixel per world pixel (full survey) and 2× the window fit scale (close-up), in crisp integer steps. This has no Game Boy equivalent:

Connected maps render their full bodies, and their NPCs appear as visual-only "ghosts", they wander but have no sight lines, triggers, dialogue, or collision until the map is actually entered.
Menus, text boxes, and battles draw at normal scale on top of the zoomed world. Zoom input is ignored while a script, menu, or battle is active; the zoom offset is persisted as save.options.zoom (default 0 = FIT) and survives New Game via options.lua.
Hotkey 4 ticks through every integer zoom level (survey → FIT → close-up → wrap). The Options row shows FIT / OUTn / INn.
Beyond the border ring the void fill repeats indefinitely (see VOID FILL below); interiors keep their own border block. Each visible map area is colorized with its own SGB palette (the original recolored the whole screen per map).
Neighbor maps load two connection hops out so corner-adjacent maps don't pop in and out, and ghost NPCs share instances with the real ones so their wander positions persist across seamless connection crossings (a warp or fresh map entry still respawns everything at its script position, like the original's per-entry sprite init).

VOID FILL

The Options VOID FILL row picks what paints the infinite beyond-edge space on OVERWORLD-tileset maps during survey zoom:

TREES (default): solid tree wall block $0F.
WATER: animated water tile $14 (same hshift cycle as on-map water).
BLACK: solid black.

Other tilesets are unchanged (house/cave borders stay as authored). Persisted as save.options.voidFill.

Tilt mode

The 3 key (and the Options menu TILT row) cycles a visual-only perspective tilt of the overworld through OFF → 15° → 35° → 50° → OFF for an HD-2D / diorama look. Like survey zoom this is purely presentational and has no Game Boy equivalent:

The entire map tilts as one rigid ground plane, paths, grass, water, floors, and every background-tile structure (buildings, trees, fences, signs; in Gen 1 these are baked into the tile layer, not sprites), so rows above the player recede and rows below come toward the viewer. Only things that actually stand on the ground draw as upright billboards, unscaled and pixel-identical to flat mode: the player, NPCs, item balls, and the standing FX attached to them (emote bubbles, the fishing rod, the FLY bird). The Poké Center heal-machine overlay stays on the ground plane with the machine tiles (it is OAM glued to a BG graphic, not a standing sprite). An earlier revision tried billboarding buildings/trees/signs too (cutting them out of the ground per hand-curated per-tileset tables); that chased an endless tail of special cases, dense tree canopy, fences fused into grass, building facades with their own baked-in fake perspective, because Gen 1's art was never drawn with a clean seam between ground and standing scenery. It wasn't merged; tilting everything but the characters as one plane is the simpler, shipped tradeoff (buildings recede/foreshorten with the ground like a photo of a diorama, rather than standing fully upright next to a full-height character).
Cycling tweens the angle between levels over ~0.25s rather than snapping; with tilt fully off the world pass drops back onto the flat blit path, so flat rendering stays pixel-identical to tilt-off and off costs nothing.
Tilt input is gated exactly like survey zoom, honored only while free-roaming, ignored while a script, menu, or battle is active, and it composes with survey zoom (the zoom scale feeds the projection). The tilt level is persisted in save.options.tilt (default OFF).
It applies everywhere the overworld draws, interiors and caves included. Menus, text boxes, and battles render flat on top, unaffected, and the infinite beyond-the-border-ring fill stays flat by design.
Collision, movement, sight lines, triggers, encounters, and scripts are untouched; nothing about the tilt reaches gameplay.

Colors mode

The 2 key (and the Options menu COLORS row) cycles the display mode through OG RED → SGB → RED++ → OG → OG INV → SGB INV → CLASSIC → OG RED. The first three are the real colorizations; the rest are DMG-shade novelties:

OG RED: the Game Boy Color boot-ROM look for Pokemon Red -- one global red BG palette + one green OBJ palette, every map, no per-map variation (Pokemon Red has no CGB code, so on a GBC the boot ROM colors it globally). The player/NPCs stay green over the red terrain via the OBP bake + post-zone redraw (PaletteFX.GBC_BG / GBC_OBJ).
SGB (default): the per-map Super Game Boy region palettes (data/sgb/sgb_palettes.asm). Sprites tint with the region palette, as on real SGB. (This is the mode formerly mislabeled "GBC".)
RED++: pokered-gbc SuperPalettes -- real per-tile GBC coloring plus per-species mon colors (data/palettes_gbc.lua).
OG: force the four DMG grays (colorization off).
OG INV: inverted DMG grays.
SGB INV: each SGB zone palette with shade order reversed.
CLASSIC: original Game Boy pea-soup greens (#9BBC0F / #8BAC0F / #306230 / #0F380F).

The shade-remap transform is applied centrally in PaletteFX.sendColors, so it covers overworld, menus, battles, and tilt upright billboards. OG RED's global BG palette is supplied by OverworldState:overworldBgColors (per-map override in the overworld pass). Persisted as save.options.colors; the gbc / gbc_inv save ids are kept for back-compat under the new labels.

GBC FX

The 5 key (and the Options menu GBC FX row) cycles a "played on real unlit-GBC hardware" post-process through OFF → 1 → 2 → 3 → 4. The levels are a cumulative ladder:

1: reflective-screen backing transparency.
2: + LCD pixel grid.
3: + pixel drop shadows.
4: + sunlight glare and rainbow shimmer with a drifting light.

It runs as a final present pass after world + UI composite in Renderer:endFrame, inspired by the Pixel Transparency RetroArch shader (github.com/mattakins/Pixel_Transparency). Default OFF; persisted as save.options.gbcfx.

Peer-to-peer link play (lua-enet)

Trades and link battles connect two copies of the game directly over lua-enet (ENet ships inside LÖVE, nothing to install, no server to run) on a reliable-ordered channel, replacing the original standalone Python room-code relay (tools/relay_server.py, deleted). HOST A GAME shows the host's LAN address (UDP 7777; POKEPORT_LINK_PORT overrides); JOIN A GAME enters it. Closing performs a graceful ENet disconnect so the final confirm/bye always lands; a vanished peer exits with "The link was broken." Internet play needs a forwarded UDP port or a VPN (deliberate tradeoff vs. the relay). Headless tests drive the protocol over an in-memory loopback (Net.loopbackPair); under LÖVE the same test file also exercises real UDP pairing.

Custom boot text

The boot sequence replaces the Nintendo / GAME FREAK identifiers with "bois club" / "bryanthaboi", a deliberate branding customization. The rest of the boot beats (copyright splash, "presents" shooting-star, the Nidorino-vs-Gengar attract scene) mirror the original.

Custom Options

Options persist in a standalone options.lua (separate from the game progress save.lua), so audio/display/battle preferences survive New Game and aren't wiped when a save slot is cleared. Changing a row in the Options menu or cycling hotkeys 2/3/4/5 writes immediately; an in-game save also flushes the live options. Old saves that still embed an options table are migrated once into options.lua on load.

Music / SFX volume
Music Filter
OG GLITCHES on / off (Gen 1 quirks vs. modern-clean battle rules)
COLORS (OG RED / SGB / RED++ / OG / OG INV / SGB INV / CLASSIC), also hotkey 2 (OG RED = GBC boot-ROM look; RED++ uses pokered-gbc SuperPalettes + per-species mon colors)
TILT (OFF / 15 / 35 / 50), also hotkey 3 while free-roaming
ZOOM (FIT / OUTn / INn), also hotkey 4 while free-roaming; wheel and -/= step one level and save
VOID FILL (TREES / WATER / BLACK) for OVERWORLD beyond-edge space
GBC FX (OFF / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4), also hotkey 5
MAX FPS (30 / 40 / 50 / 60 / 75 / 90 / 100 / 120 / 144 / 160, default 60), a hard render frame-rate cap (save.options.fpsCap).

Battle transition cascade + white battle letterbox

Into-battle wipes still run the original eight styles inside the classic 160×144 letterbox. On wide/tall windows (survey zoom), matching black 8×8 blocks cascade outward from that square into the surrounding world so the void outside the OG wipe fills in lockstep. Once the battle state is up, letterbox voids around the battle canvas fill white instead of black so the whole window reads as one continuous battle screen.

On-screen touch controls (mobile)

On Android/iOS the game draws a translucent d-pad (bottom-left), A/B buttons (bottom-right, Game Boy diagonal), and +/- START/SELECT (bottom center) over the frame, using Xelu's CC0 controller prompts (assets/touch/). Real buttons, not gestures: press lands the frame the finger does, sliding on the d-pad changes direction without lifting, and multi-touch chords (e.g. hold a direction + tap B) work. The overlay only appears while no controller is being used: the first gamepad button or stick push hides it, the next screen touch brings it back, and unplugging the last controller restores it immediately. Layout re-derives from the window size on rotation. Desktop testing: POKEPORT_TOUCH=1 love . forces the overlay on and lets the mouse act as a finger (=0 forces it off).

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