A Call to Action...

When I gave a talk on the extinction of the Z80 at VCF West in 2024, my goal was to urge people to begin working on the Aquarius+ platform that we released in 2023. It's a Modern/Retro system that picks up where the Mattel Aquarius left off in 1983, and rebuilds it in a modern, albeit 8-bit, context. I guess I achieved that goal with Iratahack, who was in attendance at the Mountain View event. He had recently developed Castle Escape, a platformer for the ZX Spectrum, and was interested in porting it to the Aquarius+ platform. Within only about a month, he had developed a working prototype, and shortly thereafter released it, much to the joy/chagrin of YouTuber TJ Ferreira. 

I was happy to have a fun, new game for the Aquarius+, but I was a bit disappointed that it didn't make full use of the graphics capabilities of the system. I wrote Iratahack and asked if I could offer some time reworking the graphics for a 16 color palette... I didn't want to offend the original graphic designers he had worked with. He agreed, and I jumped with both feet into Aseprite and Tiled to see what I could do. Those hours and hours and hours of diddling around in Koala Paint, MacPaint, Color Studio, and Photoshop had finally paid off.

I went one step further, asking Iratahack if I could also rework the splash and title screens. He showed me the original 1bpp image sources, and I went about the (very tedious) task of adding depth to the Speccy's limited palette. But I wanted a bit more, so I asked if the full color images could be used. Not batting a lash, he agreed and adapted the code to load and display the 4bpp color images used by Aquarius+.

We collaborated on Castle Escape+, Forest Escape+, and finally Pyramid Escape+, all versions of his original games with enhanced graphics for the Aquarius+. The graphics in these games also went into the Spectrum Next versions.

A few months later, I needed a fun show piece for the Aquarius+ booth at VCF SoCal, held in Orange, CA over President's Day Weekend. I proposed that we bundle the three games into the Escape Trilogy. It would consist of a plusBASIC loader that could easily run each of the three games, and the games would be modified so that they could exit back into the loader, making it easier for players to explore all three worlds within the games. Additionally, I needed a version that could be controlled ONLY by an Aquarius Hand Controller so that users didn't need a keyboard to play. Finally, I wanted an ability to set a gameplay timer so that visitors to the booth would have only a limited amount of time to spend on the game so that others could try. Iratahack rose to the challenge on all accounts with patience and enthusiasm... I am nowhere near the level of coder that he is, so my knowledge development of the workings of VS Code, WSL, and GitHub are adolescent at best.

We hope you enjoy the games, and we hope they inspire others to develop, collaborate, and explore the Aquarius+ platform, whether it's through Z80 assembly, C, or even the plusBASIC language included in the system.