jaybird3rd

Yes, Aquarius Night Stalker allows you to walk and shoot at the same time. (They went out of their way to point that out in the manual at least four times, too, as I recall.) That limitation of the Intellivision was because the Intellivision hand controllers generated conflicting Gray codes, but the Aquarius controllers are a highly simplified design—six action keys, and no side action buttons—so there are fewer conflicts. Aquarius BASIC reserves a portion of the internal RAM for its own use, but if you have an expanded RAM module, it should be able to use all of it. I don't know off the top what the largest BASIC program was, or the highest possible line number, but most programs were written for 16K modules, since that was the largest most Aquarius owners had at the time (there were very few original 32K modules produced).

The thing to remember about the Aquarius is that it was not designed by Mattel. A company called Radofin (which also manufactured the Intellivision hardware for Mattel) had already begun work on the Aquarius on its own; Mattel simply licensed it and sold it under their name. This means that, although the Aquarius bears a superficial resemblance to the Intellivision, they are very different machines. For example, the Aquarius is a Z80-based computer with an 8K implementation of Microsoft BASIC built in, but there are no game-specific routines like those in the Intellivision's EXEC. The hand controllers are a similar design to the Intellivision's—and I actually find them more comfortable to use because they're so much thinner—but they are not directly compatible; the connector pinout and the encodings are all slightly different. The Aquarius cartridge ROMs range in size from 4K to 16K, but the cartridges are not interchangeable with the Intellivision. The Aquarius uses character-based graphics, so unfortunately, its graphics capabilities are limited to the contents of its built-in character set (and the ingenuity of the programmers in creatively using them). Games like Astrosmash, Snafu, and Utopia are very similar to their Intellivision counterparts, but other games benefited more from the Intellivision's sprite-based design and actually look better on the Intellivision. Unfortunately, the Aquarius did not enjoy a long enough retail life to get many exclusive games of its own, which is why its small library is so heavy with Intellivision conversions. (However, I still plan to remedy that someday with some new Aquarius games of my own!) Thank you very much! I'll let everyone know when the site is (finally!) ready to go live.

Absolutely! I've got a few other items that will also be passed on to other collectors after I'm done scanning them.

You've done a good deed! You mentioned that you didn't necessarily want these, so if you'd like to resell any or all of those items, just let me know; I'm collecting box and manual scans for my website, and a few of those would be useful to me. In any event, thanks for rescuing them!

I think this might be a good time to remind everyone of Rule #2 in the rules of conduct. More often than not, responding in kind to another person is counterproductive: it only perpetuates the argument, and instead of persuading anyone, it only reinforces and causes both sides to double down on their points of view. I should also say that it would make life a LOT easier for everybody if certain people could learn to simply and respectfully state their opinion and then keep their peace afterward, or at the very least, have the discipline to use the "Ignore" button for its intended purpose and avoid threads that they have recurring and fundamental disagreements with. A few people today have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing that, and consequently had to be kicked out of these threads. Again, I don't enjoy doing this, but I've been placed in the predicament of having no choice.

For whatever my opinion is worth—which doesn't seem to be much these days—I don't see Tommy's post as a "sales pitch." I made it clear in the "rules of conduct" for this thread that offering corrective or clarifying information was within bounds, and as far as I can tell that is what was done.

Respectfully, that isn't your job. If you feel that somebody is breaking the rules, then you should let the moderators know about it and let us handle it. Otherwise, treat other members with respect, especially if you need to point out when you think they're mistaken; if you find that you just don't like them, you always have the option of ignoring them.

If that's the case, then what exactly is your problem? I can understand having a Chameleonesque level of skepticism a year ago, but at this point, it sounds as if certain people are just looking for reasons to continue to be disagreeable.

Somehow LePionnier's post ended up inside a gigantic table, which screwed up the formatting. I fixed it.

That's not a bad idea! If LePionnier would like to start a new thread for this, I'd be glad to pin it, and I'll also grant edit permissions so that it can be updated and maintained indefinitely.

Jean Renoir

Absolutely! I probably shouldn't mention it, but I also get an extra bonus for every doubting heretic that I banish from the threads.

Thank you for reminding everyone of the rules, @ColecoJoe. I'd like this thread to avoid collapsing into back-and-forth recriminations between members, which is what sank MrBeefy's original thread; instead, let's please limit ourselves to discussing the Amico, which is what this thread is supposed to be about. I think everyone has had their say at this point; any further back-and-forth bickering will be deleted.

Two complete Jaguar consoles and one JagCD for me, plus a few spare Jaguar motherboards "just in case." I also have one of the infamous Mike Kennedy transparent Jaguar shells that I'll mount a spare board into at some point, when I have time to make the necessary modifications to it.

I think this is as good a time as any to remind everyone of the rules of this thread, and of course, our community guidelines as well.

I'm still catching up, but so far I'm reminded of this:

... and I was only a page or two behind you!

I changed the thread title to something more descriptive. I also would recommend double-checking your soldering.

I wouldn't bother. In my opinion, that thread has become nothing but an unwieldy pile of garbage. There aren't many updates from "AINO" (I like that!) except their latest creative attempts at dragging their feet on "that Ataribox?" while giving the appearance of working hard on it, or announcements of licensed merchandising deals where other people—who actually know what they're doing—are handling all the product development. Even if any substantive updates are posted, they're buried so fast that anyone reading the thread later has to dig through layers of stale Taco shells to find them. I'm pleased that we've mostly kept the signal-to-noise ratio more favorable here.

That would be very much in the tradition of Intellivision, going all the way back to David Stifel's "Game Factory" for the Entertainment Computer System (ECS). Speaking of the ECS ... I know you've got a lot on your plate already, but I hope you can find room for a modernized version of David Warhol's "Mind Strike." It's an excellent game that deserved more exposure than it got on the ECS back in the day.

When I play classic Night Stalker, I usually play it on the Aquarius also. The original Intellivision version is great, of course, but I've always found it a bit sluggish even on the fastest setting. The Aquarius version feels just right to me, and I'm pleased to see that the Amico version seems to be paced similarly. The Aquarius version also solved the problem of not being able to move and shoot at the same time (because the Aquarius hand controllers generate different Gray codes with fewer conflicting values). The fire buttons do take some getting used to, but with practice, you can actually use both controllers simultaneously, moving with one hand and firing with the other. I'm amazed at what I've seen so far of the Amico version of Night Stalker, and I especially love the multiplayer mode! I'm looking forward to trying it!

Are you testing the memory modules in the Aquarius console itself, or in the Mini Expander? If you're using the Mini Expander, try disconnecting it and testing the modules directly in the Aquarius console instead. If that doesn't work, inspect the contacts inside the console's cartridge connector; even if there doesn't appear to be any physical damage to the pins, they may be in need of a cleaning. Have you successfully tested any program cartridges? The data from/to the Aquarius cartridge port is buffered through PLA2. This is also the chip which combines graphics from the character generator ROM into RGB data for the Color IC, so if this chip was completely dead, I suspect that you wouldn't see any video output at all. Anything can happen, of course, but the cartridge connector itself seems to me to be a more likely point of failure.