I've accumulated a little info on the Radofin Aquarius (as that's the flavor of Aquarius that I've got). Apparently Mattel made the Aquarius for a short time and then dumped it when it didn't make money. Radofin who was the manufacturer purchased the rights to it and continued to manufacture it for another 2 years. At some point, but apparently not immediately they changed from a Zilog Z-80 to some kind of Z-80 clone for a processor (I can't remember what at the moment - I think it may have been an NEC chip). I've talked to a person who's R-Aquarius has a Z-80 in it, but mine has the clone chip. Functionally there appears to be no difference between the models. Mattel has been removed from the top logo in the Radofin version. It also looks like the Radofin guys were overachievers when it came to internal shielding. I was told by a Mattel owner that the guts of his machine were shielded by that cheezy cardboard/foil stuff and screwed to the main board. Mine is encased in a poorly vented metal box which is soldered all around to the main board (yeah, it was a bitch to remove. Now it's screwed down.) Bill ---------------------------------------------------- Bill Whitson - Classic Computers ListOp bill(a)booster.u.washinton.edu or bcw(a)u.washington.edu http://weber.u.washington.edu/~bcw/ccl.html On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Jeff Hellige wrote:

jeffh(a)unix.aardvarkol.com said, I bought one of these at a second-hand store a few weeks ago and didn't even notice until I got it home that there was no mention of Mattel anywhere on the box. I would have assumed it was earlier than the Mattel version, not later, because it's got a 1983 copyright date on it and I can't imagine anyone buying an Aquarius (for full price) any later than that. Scott Ware mentioned there being four languages on the box of his. Mine has five: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, though there are some things that only appear in English and French and a few that are in English only. Bill Whitson mentioned the heavy shielding -- yes, there's a *lot* of metal inside the case, and sufficiently soldered down to make me wonder whether their goal wasn't so much to prevent RF interference as to keep people from snooping at the electronics. Mine came with a box but no manuals, so all I know about it is the location of the start of screen memory (revealed as 12328 in a photo of the manual reproduced on the box) and the usual things that you expect to find in a Microsoft BASIC. The most interesting thing about it to me was that it comes up in lowercase by default, which seems to be almost unheard of in early 1980s micros. I was also surprised that it accepts both ^X and ^U as line-erase characters in its line editor, but then I got a TRS-80 Model 100 and it does the same thing, so maybe this is just something common to the later MS BASICs. eric