What can you tell me about the Mattel Aquarius?

[RJBowman]

I may soon be getting a Mattel Aquarius.

What I remember about this machine is that it was announced, and it was speculated that it would be based on the Intellivision hardware specification. Then the machine arrived, and it was sorely lacking in graphics; 16-color text mode only, with 2x3 block graphics characters (similar to Commodore's PETSCII blocks) to create low-res graphics. No hires; no sprites; not so much as programmable characters.

What I have read about it online is that Mattel decided to sell computers, so they looked for a ready-made design that they could license. The far-east contractor that manufactured the Intellivision has just such a design ready to go into production. It had 40 columns of text, just as I remembered, and 16 display colors. One sound channel. 4 kilobytes of RAM, which I guess was twice what the Timex Sinclair had. Mattel's programmers called it "the computer for the seventies".

Does anyone have any first hand knowledge of this machine? Are there any technical references online? Has anyone done a demoscene demo to prove that everyone was wrong about this little machine?

[Misfit]

Few months ago I tried to buy an Aquarius but somebody paid more.
It has Z80 and z88dk compiler supports it.
So it's an interesting platform for homebrew stuff.

[RJBowman]

I found video of an Aquarius game running on an emulator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD3XOP4vzqE

It looks like what you would expect a text-based game to look like, but I noticed one thing that I had not read about in my web sources; the machine seems to have something similar to the C-64's extended background color mode.

[RJBowman]

Here's another video showing how someone got around the limitations of Aquarius's limited video hardware:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmAleMQIqeg

[Misfit]

This would be interesting : http://atariage.com/forums/topic/189033 ... cartridge/