I’ve been playing with my “new” Mattel Aquarius, trying to find out what it can and can’t do. The BASIC appears to be standard fare for early-80’s Microsoft BASIC, if a little limited. The character set is interesting, containing crude graphics characters which are used by the (few) games – there is no graphics mode apart from the graphic characters, so all games must be written to use the inbuilt character set.
Interestingly I have discovered an interesting restriction built into the BASIC. Certain parts of the memory map are not accessible using the PEEK (and I’d presume POKE) command. One thing I like to do with a new computer is write a small program which will let you interrogate blocks of memory. Doing this you can usually find where the screen memory lives, determine where BASIC programs live, scan the BASIC ROM for keywords (so you know what the language can/can’t do) and maybe even find the character bitmaps. With the Aquarius though, PEEKing some locations give an error message – I am guessing this was intended to hide the BASIC ROM from prying eyes. I guess that means I’ll have to try my hand at writing some Z80 code to do my snooping…
BTW, so far I haven’t been able to figure out how to edit a line of BASIC short of retyping the whole line and on a chicklet keyboard that gets old fast! If anyone reading this has an Aquarius manual they could scan in for me I would be most appreciative.
like the blog.
do you have any bbc micro’s ?
I don’t have any BBC’s. The BBC wasn’t very popular down here in Australia, so they are not very easy to find. Also, the Beeb just wasn’t high on my list of machines that I wanted back in the day. I was interested in a wide range of machines (most of which I never had a chance to use) such as the Spectrum, Dragon 32, Oric-1, Acorn Electron, Jupiter Ace and so on. The BBC and MicroBee (an Australian home computer) were just not high on my list… 8^/
Having said that, if I see a BBC going cheap on eBay I’ll most likely pick it up, but there haven’t been many on offer down here.