Mattel Aquarius
Holy Moly I can't believe I found this Mattel Aquarius in Vintage Gamer in Halesowen near Birmingham, it's quite a rare machine as it was only on sale for a few months in 1983, this one is boxed (but with no polys) and is in immaculate condition apart from the model label which is starting to peel off now
The Aquarius was made by Radofin which made the previous Intellivision console, it has a Z80 as the processor, 4K of RAM (expandable), 8K ROM with Microsoft BASIC, monophonic sound (expandable with the expansion block), a horrible rubber chiclet keyboard, and character based graphics, similar to PETSCII. There was an Aquarius 2 but it was not released in any great numbers
Top and bottom of the box
The two sides, the opposite sides are identical
A free RF lead, it isn't the original one
The top and bottom, the machine itself feels really well built and sturdy, it is about the size of an Acorn Electron, or a Spectrum 128 (Toastrack), with a fair weight to it, it feels good. There is a green LED to the right of the Aquarius legend
There's a main switch on the side
On the rear, ignoring the cartridge slot, is the printer port, cassette port, the H-L switch which isn't populated in Europe, RF out and the permently attached cable to the PSU
Here is a close-up of the rubber chiclet keyboard, this somehow manages to be worse than the original Spectrum, and the RST key wipes any programme in memory, it does have a collar around it, but it's still far too easy to press. Also, there's no delete key!But it's still not the worst keyboard, that honour goes to the Oric 1
This is the cartridge slot, the on board RAM is only 4K, this cartridge adds 16K for a total of 20K. There would have been a plastic cover over this for when no cartridge is installed, but I didn't get it
The cartridge itself
A program catalog is all the documentation I got with the machine
The hard wired PSU
This machine is fully working, the boot screen cycles through Blue, Green, and yellow colours
Pressing Return takes you straight to BASIC, and my usual programme works just fine here
Here's a video of the boot screen, I like it a lot, however the BASIC screen is just blue, I can't imagine how annoying it would be typing in a programme with the background colours cycling away
For more retro hardware check out my online museum here
