Mattel Aquarius character set


When Mattel decided to market a home computer, it did not start by designing one, and instead looked around for a pre-made system it could market under its name. It discovered that one of its manufacturing partners, the Hong Kong based Radofin Electronics Far East, had already designed a three-system line of home computers. All Mattel had to do was secure the U.S. marketing rights, which it promptly did for the first two units in the line, and have Radofin handle the manufacturing.
The simplest unit, originally code-named "Checkers" and which was eventually named the Aquarius, did have some good things going for it. The 13.5 x 6 x 2 inch unit was equipped with the same Z-80A microprocessor used in many other home and business computers of the era ; it had built-in BASIC, being a subset of full Microsoft BASIC; it had the ability to utilize cartridge-based games and other software; and, it had a color video display. But it also featured a mere 4K of RAM with only about 1.7K free for BASIC programs, a "chicklet" keyboard with just 48 keys and a reset button, a one-voice tone generator for sound, no programmable graphics, no sprites, no game controllers, no monitor port, a non-standard printer interface, ordinary cassette access at 600 baud, and no expansion capability except for what could be plugged into the cartridge port. Given that the unit was introduced in 1983, these features did not make it strongly competitive in the home computer market.
To address some of the limitations, Mattel added a larger character set to the original Radofin design, so that games could use character graphics.

Character set

The following table shows the Mattel Aquarius character set. Each character is shown with a potential Unicode equivalent if available. Space characters are represented by the abbreviations for their names.
� No Unicode equivalent