Replying to myself... I didn't read carefully enough. It's not the ECS, but the infamous Mattel Aquarius that you're referring to. I have a bunch of those as well. That was Mattel's stand-alone computer system, severely underpowered for the time and quickly relegated to bargain bins and closeout stores. Aesthetically quite nice looking (in my opinion) - in fact it shared aesthetic similarities with the ECS - but it had nothing else going for it. Radofin - the actual developers of the system - picked up the remaining stock of Aquarius computers and sold them for a short time and/or gave them to liquidators/prize distributors when Mattel pulled out. The nice thing about the Radofin version was that they included a cassette of programs to run, which the Mattel distributed version didn't include. There were many Aquarius bundles, from just the keyboard all the way up to sets with a tape drive and 40 column printer. The latter two are actually ECS compatible. While the Aquarius and Intellivision had several of the same games created for them (the Aquarius versions were generally inferior--yes, it was worse than a 1978 Intellivision!), outside of the printer/tape drive, they were in no way compatible (and I'm going by memory on the cross-compatibility of the printer/tape drive--one or the other may not be cross-compatible; at some point I'll check it out).
Replying to myself... I didn't read carefully enough. It's not the ECS, but the infamous Mattel Aquarius that you're referring to. I have a bunch of those as well. That was Mattel's stand-alone computer system, severely underpowered for the time and quickly relegated to bargain bins and closeout stores. Aesthetically quite nice looking (in my opinion) - in fact it shared aesthetic similarities with the ECS - but it had nothing else going for it. Radofin - the actual developers of the system - picked up the remaining stock of Aquarius computers and sold them for a short time and/or gave them to liquidators/prize distributors when Mattel pulled out. The nice thing about the Radofin version was that they included a cassette of programs to run, which the Mattel distributed version didn't include. There were many Aquarius bundles, from just the keyboard all the way up to sets with a tape drive and 40 column printer. The latter two are actually ECS compatible. While the Aquarius and Intellivision had several of the same games created for them (the Aquarius versions were generally inferior--yes, it was worse than a 1978 Intellivision!), outside of the printer/tape drive, they were in no way compatible (and I'm going by memory on the cross-compatibility of the printer/tape drive--one or the other may not be cross-compatible; at some point I'll check it out).
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director | Armchair Arcade, Inc.
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.