Bugziacs is a homebrew Atari ST port of Don Priestley‘s classic ZX Spectrum game, Maziacs, created by Bello Games and available to download free from the internet. It was first released in 2019.

According to the developers this conversion runs the original ZX Spectrum code, translated to 68000 code using a custom tool, and with some routines replaced with ST specific code. It feels authentic to some degree, but of course the graphics have been changed. It says “put Fanta here” in the target area, but you’re still looking for a chest of gold. The gameplay also feels slightly different to the Spectrum original. I found that you always lose a fight without a sword in your possession, which isn’t the case in the Spectrum version.

Bugziacs is fun to play for a while, although I did encounter a number of bothersome bugs along the way. The most serious of which was that, when accessing the map, then exiting out, the life energy meter would sometimes continue to deplete. Which shouldn’t happen. Life energy is consumed when looking at the map (only on difficulty level two and above), but that should stop when you close the map. Also: the screen didn’t clear the pink map background when returning to the game. There are also on-screen messages that flash up so quickly that you can’t read them, and the move calculation when you complete a level doesn’t work properly. So Bugziacs does seem to be unfinished.

Still, this is an interesting homebrew remake of a great game, that is a fun diversion for a short while. The instruction screens show the original ZX Spectrum graphics for Maziacs, so I was wondering if it was possible to play the game with those enabled. After some digging I read that pressing F1/F2 toggled between the old and new graphics, but it didn’t work in the version I had. I did see that there was an updated version available, but it was behind a login on a website I had no access to. And unfortunately all the other versions I found online were the old versions. Hopefully someone at Bello Games will make the fixed version more easily available. It seems a shame to have the older, buggy versions available, but not the most recent one. It does seem ironic that Bugziacs is full of bugs… 🙂 So come on guys: replace all those old versions with the fixed version!

More: Maziacs on Wikipedia
More: Bugziacs on atarimania.com