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Hardware - Released

40 Column Printer

     Ahh, yes, the mighty Aquarius printer. This is one of the items which made it truly difficult to be productive with the Aquarius. After all, even if you finally mastered "File Form" well enough to type up a proper document, what good is a receipt size piece of paper printed in BLUE text?! Who are you going to mail that to? Which professor would accept your thesis printed in such a manner? Soon I will post a pic of an Aquarius printout so you can get a look at it. I must assume that Mattel thought it to be a very simple hardcopy solution, making the printer match the 40 column limitations of the Aquarius display. Would it have been too difficult to have horizontal scrolling text on screen and print out to a standard 8.5 x 11 printer? Interestingly, both "File Form" and "Fin Form" have the ability to modify the print options to allow for 80+ column printing. I should try to interface a standard serial printer to the Aquarius and dignify it with a proper printout.  I do have several replacement rolls of thermal paper, but what happens when they are depleted? The size is a very non-standard 4 3/8 in. wide (127mm).  For replacement paper, I have succeeded in cutting a roll of regular thermal fax paper down to the correct Aquarius size.  Modern thermal paper is of a much higher quality than the "stock" rolls I have.  Best of all, the print out is black, not blue!

The printer is fast (80cps is claimed) and quiet, though very NON-letter quality.

The "Blue Sky Rangers"  mention that the Aquarius printer was probably the same device used for the Intellivision ECS.

Data Recorder

The Aquarius Data Recorder for as far as I knew was the only permanent storage device available for the Aquarius. I used to dream about the Master Expansion module which was advertised by Mattel, but that product was likely killed long before I ever saw the sales flyer back in '84. The recorder tends to be pretty reliable, using standard audio tapes. At first, back in '84, I did not own one of the Mattel recorders, and used just a generic Panasonic tape recorder. It was always a head-ache. My programs would never save/load properly and I usually had to retype some portion of a program whenever I loaded it in.

After I got one of these babies, my problems went away.  Data transfer has always been reliable.  All play/record/stop functions must be done manually by the user. Apparently they were planning to include auto-motor control similar to the Tandy COCO (and others?). The computer would start the tape playing automatically when you entered the "Cload" or "Csave" commands. I believe this was planned judging by the unused "Rem" jack on the back of the unit where the "mic" and "phone" jacks plug in. That feature was probably eliminated to save costs. Too bad, because the motor relay was a useful function for hobby projects on the COCO.  It is often used to turn the hobby device on or off automatically.

The data transfer rate of the Data Recorder is 600 baud.  I conducted a few tests to see how this translates in to save/load times.  To conduct the tests, I used the file manager/word processor program "FileForm" because it is fairly easy to fill up the available ram by copying a block of text and then pasting it repeatedly until the memory is full.  All three ram expansion carts were tested.  Here are the results:

Mini-Expander

This device should not be an add on.  The capabilities the Mini-Expander add to the Aquarius should have been implemented in the main CPU.  Especilly considering how Mattel only released their software in cart form.  The mini-expander allows you to have a program cartridge AND a memory expansion cart plugged in simultaniously.  (Incidentally, I believe the only piece of software Mattel released that was NOT on a cart was the terminal program for use with the Aquarius Modem, which came on cassette tape.)  

Other features of the Mini are: "The addition of 2 more sound channels and includes 2 detachable hand controllers with 8' coiled cords: 16 position disc!  6 action buttons!"

Now they say "addition of 2 more sound channels," but I think that in fact the sound chip on board the mini-expander has a full 3 sound channels (the same sound chip used on the Intellivision), making a total of 4.  However, it seems that any games which utilize the mini's sound chip, do NOT use the cpu's built in sound generator, unless the game is played without the mini plugged in (i.e. the game cart is plugged directly into the cartridge port of the computer).  So, as to not to mislead anyone into believing they would hear some 4 part harmony's Mattel opted to say that it adds only 2 sound channels  Some games do not utilize the extra sound channels at all (e.g. AD&D Treasure of Tarmin, Nightstalker).  This is no doubt probably due to either ram restrictions on the computer or Rom restricions on the cart.  All Mattel games were made to be played without the need for a ram expansion cart.  Some games, however, make excellent use of the extra sound capabilities offered by the Mini-expander.  You can read more and possibly download some .wav files of my favorite Aquarius game tunes at the Software page (under construction).

The controllers are what appear to be a cheapened version of the Intellivision controllers.  The look and feel chinsy.  However, even with the heavy use my three brothers, plus many neighbor kids and I gave my old Aquarius back in the 80's, I never had a problem with the controllers.  They could have been much better, however.  First of all, there should have been a fire button.  That's a no-brainer.  Secondly, it is difficult to find the "diagonals" on the disc controller.  I find it quite interesting that no program uses the full "16 positions" on the disc.  It's hard enough to fing the 4 diagonals!  Anyway, I don't believe the Aquarius has sufficient graphics resolution to put those extra 8 positions to use.  On games which do have diagonal movement, the programmers may have mapped those 8 positions to one of the other input directions. ???

Over all, the mini-expander is an essential peripheral and performs its job quite nicely.  One caveat:  the mini-expander puts out enough RF interference to form wavy lines on the TV while it is plugged in.  I wish the Aquarius had composite output! ;-(

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