Page 16 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #41 FREE Edition

As mentioned earlier, the Intellivision was always planned as part of a system that included much more than just a game console. It has been explained as being like
a stereo system, where you would just buy the extra components, and they would all tie together into your entertainment system like those stacks of black components in your wood cabinets in the 80s and 90s.
Keyboard Component / Entertainment Computer System
Mattel initially planned to release a Keyboard Component add-on for the Intellivision, which was intended
to enhance the console with an additional 16k of RAM, its own
6502 processor, Microsoft Basic, expansion slots, and a cassette storage system. However, this
unit struggled to reach the market primarily due to high production costs. It was briefly tested in select markets at a price of $600, and only an estimated 500 units made it to store shelves.
The situation was complicated
by advertising claims that led to consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which resulted in Mattel being fined $10,000 daily until the product
was released. Ultimately, Mattel introduced the Entertainment Computer System (ECS), a separate development from the Keyboard Component. The ECS, which
was stylistically similar to the Intellivision II, was launched in 1983 but failed to gain traction, partly due to the Video Game Market Crash. This system included only
2k of additional RAM and 12k of ROM, significantly less than what
was initially promised with the Keyboard Component. Information on the previous IntellivisionLives. Com website, now superseded by BlueSkyRangers.com, tells how Mattel released the ECS system they had been developing separately.
Furthermore, the ECS was compatible only with the Intellivision II model, not the original wood-grain units sold under the Intellivision, Tandy, or Sears brands. This add-on, along with
the Game Changer which enabled the playing of Atari cartridges, could not be used with the original Intellivision console.
The next hardware that Mattel Electronics licensed was a unit
from the Hong Kong manufacturer of much of their products, called
the Aquarius. The Mattel Aquarius was an 8-bit home computer
system released in 1983 by Mattel Electronics in an attempt to continue the success of their Intellivision consoles. The Aquarius was designed by Radofin and was based on the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. It had a rubber chiclet keyboard, 4K
of RAM, and a subset of Microsoft BASIC in ROM. The Aquarius connected to a television for audio and visual output, and used a cassette tape recorder for secondary data storage. Mattel also released a limited number of peripherals for the Aquarius, including a 40-column thermal printer, a 4-color printer/ plotter, and a 300 baud modem.
The Aquarius+
by Sean Harrington
In the Summer of 2021, Sean Harrington posed a question to his fellow members of the Mattel
Aquarius Computer group on Facebook, asking what their wish list for a next-generation Aquarius would include. Most respondents mentioned five key upgrades: programmable characters, sprites & bitmap graphics, clear video output on modern screens, more RAM, and removable random-access storage.
Around this same period, David Murray (The 8-Bit Guy) and his team were working on developing Commander X16, a 6502-based system that had many of the same video features requested by the Aquarius user base. The video solution for Commander X16 was implemented in a daughtercard named V.E.R.A. (Versatile Embedded Retro Adapter) designed by Frank van den Hoef. Sean reached out to Frank in late October and asked
how the V.E.R.A. could be adapted for Aquarius, hoping it would be an IO-based device that could be easily bus-mapped. What Sean didn’t know was that Frank was already considering designing his own Z80-based 8-bit system. Leveraging the orphaned Aquarius architecture would bring a BASIC interpreter and a modest software library to the new system, and the Z80 CPU offered a variety of established assemblers and compilers to work with, as well as over forty years’ worth of legacy code that could be quickly adapted for the new system.
With a shared goal in mind, the
two began work on what would eventually become Aquarius+. Frank reviewed the legacy virtualization code for Aquarius components
from MAME, the recently released disassembly and documentation of the Aquarius S1 and S2 SYSROMs,
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OLD SCHOOL GAMER MAGAZINE • ISSUE #41
INTELLIVISION
COMPUTERS
by Ryan Burger and Sean Harrington