| Connect! |
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PC
Connected! |
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| Unbelievable but true, you can connect your old Aquarius to
your PC, and send data to the PC. |
You will need :-
1 x 9 Pin-D Female connector
1 x 1/4 Inch stereo audio connector jack.
1 piece of 3 conductor wire.
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Audio Jack TIP ---> Pin 2 (RxD) of the 9 pin D
Audio Jack RING ---> pin 4 (DTR) of the 9 Pin D
Audio Jack SHAFT ---> pin 5 (GND) of the 9 pin D
Connect pins 7 (CTS) and 8 (RTS) of the 9 Pin D together.
Connect pins 4 and 6 of the 9 pin D together
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Push the audio jack into the PRINTER port of the Aquarius and the 9 Pin
D into the serial port of your PC.
Using your favourite comms package such as HyperTerminal, set the comms parameters
to 1200 baud, no parity, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit and Hardware Handshaking.
You must enable hardware handshaking as this provides the 'printer ready'
signal to the aquarius.
Anything you LPRINT or COPY from the Aquarius will be received by the
PC
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Rom Encryption |
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The Game Cartridges (ROMs) used by the Aquarius Home Computer System were
encrypted to prevent illegal access to the code. However the form of
encryption was very weak and any programmer worth his salt would have
sussed it out without too much trouble. Once you have a copy of the
contents of the rom you only need to XOR each location with a specific
value to decypher the rom. The specific value required varies for each ROM
cartridge and is stored within the rom cartridge itself. However it too is
encrypted and is not easy to decrypt. There is an easier way however!
Simply write a BASIC or C program to take in the rom dump adn XOR it with
every value form 0 to 0xff and see which one gives you the correct output.
You will know when you have the right one because you'll be able to find
the text 'COPYRIGHT MATTEL' inside the file. |
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Character Set
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Here is a bitmap showing the entire character set of the Mattel Aquarius.
Note that the 80x72 'Hi-res' mode was acheived by the use of 64 characters
from the set, not be programmable graphics!
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