jaybird3rd

Yeah, but I think you were more helpful; I didn't realize there were that many third-party releases on cassette. I was under the impression that the Aquarius was about as unpopular overseas as it was here in the States, with the Sinclair and MSX machines dominating the inexpensive Z80-based computer market in Europe in particular.

The Aquarius was originally cream-colored: I suppose the color you're seeing could have been caused by sun damage, although the Aquarius doesn't seem as vulnerable to this as, say, the SNES.

Martin van de Steenoven's website is the best one I know of.

I posted some tips a while back that you might find useful: And yes, you can only hold one magic item at a time. I've attached a scan of the instructions. They're also available on the Intellivision Lives! website, but the "Software" section of the site seems to be down at the moment: IM_Thunder_Castle.pdf

I'm very interested in this module, and I fully intend to place my order as soon as I can, but my "hobby money" is tied up in my other projects, and I might not have any available until after some of those are finished. I suspect that a lot of us who are interested are just trying to find a way to work it into our finances. We'll come through, but we just need some time.

I've got a copy of this book, which I used when I was a kid to create a text adventure or two. It does a good job of explaining the basics and walking you through creating a (pretty decent) sample adventure. It's written to be platform-agnostic, and I can't think of anything in it that wouldn't work on the Aquarius version of BASIC, so maybe I can take some time after the project is finished to scan it in.

And it just got even better: we managed to acquire a complete scan of the incredibly rare manual for Zero In earlier today. This was the last Aquarius cartridge manual that had never been archived in any form, but now that we have it, I will be able to include full documentation for all of the games on the cartridge! Because of their length, the manuals for the applications and programming languages will probably be offered in an "abridged" form inside the cartridge, but full scans of all of them will be available shortly after the project is complete.

Yes, both the loose boards and the cartridges with shells will come with some kind of label.

Probably the video upgrade board (which I mentioned earlier in another thread) and a new game. I can't finish the game until I have the video upgrade to test it on, and I can't test the video upgrade without having software written for it, so I'll do both at the same time. Check the "mockups" that I posted in the SuperFont thread for an idea of what the game might be.

Thank you. I'm making a list of everyone who has expressed interest, either here or through PMs or e-mail. When they're finally ready (within the next few weeks, I'm hoping), you'll be the first ones to know.

Congratulations! It's great to see the 99/4A getting larger and larger cartridges. I've been getting into the wonderful world of bankswitched cartridge boards myself, with a new 1MB bankswitched board that I designed for the Mattel Aquarius. It's interesting that you went with a "daughterboard" design that mounted onto one of the original cartridge boards; I thought of doing something similar for the Atari 7800 at one point, because it is a great way to economize (assuming you can find enough suitable boards). Unlike your board, I ended up going with "old school" technology on mine: EPROMs and TTL. It was my first attempt to design a cartridge board and I wanted to stick with something simple, and I found that TTL chips and EPROMs are still readily available (and very inexpensive) in the used/overstock market. For my next project, though, I'll probably use something a little more modern.

Thank you! I haven't finalized the price yet, but it will probably be $65 plus shipping for one assembled and tested multi-cart board, which you can insert into any Aquarius cartridge "donor" that you might have in your collection. If you need a cartridge shell to go with it, I have a limited quantity of new shells that I will offer for an extra $10 each. Since these shells will come from new copies of Night Stalker, you'll get a Night Stalker box, manual, and overlay set to go with them. I'd love to offer new shells for everyone, of course, but they're somewhat rare, and especially difficult to come by new and in large quantities. Unfortunately, having new shells manufactured is out of the question because of the high cost of plastic tooling.

I'm referring to the Mattel Aquarius, and it's not surprising that you haven't heard of it: it's an obscure early-80s home computer that had a very short life in the marketplace, although it continues to have a small but devoted following today. My multi-cart will include the entire known Aquarius cartridge library, which is pretty small: eleven games, and nine applications/utilities. It will also include the text of the instruction manuals, which you can read on-screen, along with some historical information, trivia, and other bonuses. I haven't finalized the cost yet, but it will probably be $65, plus an extra $10 if you need a cartridge shell (Aquarius shells are somewhat rare, especially in large quantities, so I'm forced to offer them separately).

There is, and a very good one at that: the Cuttle Cart 3, the successor of the Intellicart.

I bought a 5200 and a collection of games earlier this month. Everything looked great and was extremely well-packed. Thanks!

I totally agree. I've been beating that drum for a long time myself, actually: The standard answer I get when I present these kinds of arguments is that it's easier and less risky to use existing ideas than to develop new ones. I'm also told that homebrew developers are not game designers (or that particular developers don't have any special abilities in that area), but are doing it primarily as a technical exercise. I can certainly sympathize with the creative risk and the difficulty involved in creating something original, but to me, that should be the whole point of engaging in creative hobbies of any kind. As mos6507 said in the thread I linked to in my quote: The Intellivision in particular is just begging for new game ideas, especially since it is such a unique system with strengths and capabilities all its own. Ideally, a new homebrew game for the Intellivision would be designed to play to those strengths as much as possible, instead of taking ideas for other systems and shoehorning them into what the Intellivision can do. You'll never get to see what the system really has to offer that way.

Well, I don't want to toot my own horn, but there is my upcoming Mattel Aquarius multi-cart. Granted, it's still in development and won't be released until later this year, but it does meet the OP's criteria: menu-driven, pre-populated, plug-and-play, no DIP switches.

The Aquarius uses the same RF modulator as the Intellivision II, so I'm sure you could adapt one of the free Intellivision mod designs for the Aquarius. I tried it once, and it worked, but I wasn't happy with the video quality I got (there were lots of vertical streaks). That was an issue with the mod itself, though; it didn't look any better on the Intellivision. My next project will probably be an Aquarius video upgrade, which will combine composite and S-Video outputs with my SuperFont upgrade for reprogrammable characters. I'll need to have SuperFont in particular for some of the Aquarius cartridge games that I want to do. Since the Aquarius's character generator outputs TTL-level RGB, it might even be possible to use a D2A converter and encoder to create VGA-compatible output (if the scan rates are compatible), but I'm still researching it so I don't know for certain.

There are no moving parts inside the Intellivision (or Aquarius) hand controllers, aside for the disc itself; they're built using printed circuits on mylar sheets, the same way most keyboards are made today. The areas directly underneath the disc are covered with a ring of conductive pads in two layers, sandwiched together. As you press the disc in a particular direction, it closes the gap between the layers, the pads touch, the circuit closes, and the direction is registered. The keypad and action buttons work in much the same way. It's actually a bit more complicated than that because there aren't actually separate pairs of pads for each direction, but that gives you the general idea. Because the design wasn't based on physical switches (the way Atari joysticks are), going from eight directions to sixteen was just a matter of adding extra contact points. If a game only needed four or eight directions, it would simply ignore the others. For games that did benefit from all sixteen directions, the design worked pretty well; the control was actually quite smooth. And the disc actually did rotate inside the hand controller; it's a solid piece of plastic with a metal (or, for the Intellivision II and Aquarius, hard black plastic) plate on top of it to make it more durable. You can spin it around in circles, or you can rock it back and forth on its center with two fingers. These are the easiest ways to use it; trying to push it around with your thumb like a gamepad will only fatigue your hands.

Just a quick update to say that the second batch of prototypes has finally arrived: I've been testing them this weekend, and so far, they've functioned perfectly. The few issues I've found were fixed fairly easily, so aside for a few cosmetic changes, this will likely be the final version of the hardware. Much more to come shortly!

Heh ... I'm not egotistical enough to think that my humble little project was responsible. Then again, I did stock up on a few extra systems (and a whole lot of cartridges for shell donors) when they were still fairly inexpensive, because I suspected something like this might happen.

Is it just me, or has Aquarius stuff been getting a lot more expensive on eBay recently? Only a few months ago, you could find a complete system (computer, Mini-Expander, and a few games) in decent shape for something like $30 shipped.

I'll just add that, for anyone who can provide complete scans of the Zero-In manual, I'll match the OP's $25 reward with an additional $25. When it is released, I'll throw in a free multi-cart as well. Zero-In is the last original Aquarius cartridge manual that remains to be archived, and I would indeed like to include it in the documentation for my multi-cart project. Thanks!

Offhand, I don't know if this was ever mentioned in an article or not. I got that information from an interview that Bruce Davis (who was president of Imagic from 1983 until it closed in the spring of 1985) gave to Retro Gaming Radio, in their November 2004 episode. Here is a rough transcript, starting at about 32:30: This was said in the context of discussing the business problems Imagic had during the crash years and their efforts to transition to home computers. According to Davis, the home computer market was too small to sustain Imagic and was already divided up between several companies (mainly Broderbund, Electronic Arts, Activision, and Sierra Online), and the few opportunities they could find didn't come through for them. Incidentally, the second opportunity that Davis mentioned was a contract with IBM to develop entertainment software for the PCjr, which of course was a failed system.

That's what the Intellivision version added: The Intellivision version really puts the Atari version to shame, in my opinion.