This page is all about the El-Fish Virtual Aquarium developed by San Francisco software company AnimaTek and released through Maxis. El-Fish was designed and created by Alexey Pajitov, and Vladimir Pokhilko more famously known for the ever popular Tetris...

Anyone not lucky enough to own (or have a PC capable of running) El-Fish may not know an image of the production team is stored within the about dialogue, even if you do have El-Fish, seeing the image outside of the game may still be of some interest to you.

Due to the weird system requirements for El-Fish (486 or less) it will not run correctly on any PC that we currently own, so we generally run the Mac version on our PC's using the Basilisk II emulator it's not an ideal solution, but it works well enough, we even used it to get the Mac version images available on the screenshots page.

We do however play with El-Fish far more on an old 3400 PowerBook we originally purchased to play the Mac versions of Aquazone and Pinna (not to mention Catz, Dogz & Oddballz)... all six games happily coexist, it was really quite a cheap buy on eBay. :)

We have managed to get the DOS version of El-Fish working on newer PC's, using the DOSBox emulator, we've even been able to apply the SVGA patch by editing the 'inst_480.prg' file as directed in the F.A.Q. but unfortunately for us we couldn't get it to work without glitches, so we are limited to using the 376x348 or 640x400 resolutions, all things considered, 640x400 works quite well in an emulated environment.

We have packaged up the 1.01 DOS version with DOSbox into an easy to install package [install_elfish.exe] for windows users.

El-Fish is a very old game and can no longer be purchased in stores (not for a very long time) you may be able to find in on eBay, I've seen and bought both the PC and Mac versions that way, but it's rare and doesn't come up for auction frequently, a faster solution for most would be abandon ware sites such as Home of the Underdogs, they have both the PC version and Mac version available for download.

Much more information about El-Fish is available in the F.A.Q. released by El-Breeder, we see no point going over the same information again, so just go ahead and read it...

The original EL-Fish site is long gone, but the Tech Support pages are available here, Maxis (now owned by Electronic Arts) hardly even mention El-Fish on their site. :(

El-Fish was developed on an old Russian computer with odd display resolutions, a SVGA patch was made available to give a more normal 640x480 resolution option, this works well on compatible hardware, but didn't work correctly for us when emulated.

IBM PC Compatibles

Processor: 386 (486 Recommended)
Operating System: MS-DOS 3.3 or later
RAM: 4 MB (8 MB Recommended)
Hard Disk: 8 MB free space...
(Plus an average 1 MB per tank)
3.5" 1.4MB high-density floppy disk drive
Video: SVGA display and 256 colors

Apple Macintosh

Processor: 68020 (68030 Recommended)
Operating System: System 7 or later
RAM: 5 MB (8 MB Recommended)
Hard Disk: 8 MB free space...
(Plus an average 1 MB per tank)
3.5" 1.4MB high-density floppy disk drive
Monitor: 256-color-capable

English Version 1.02
Note: The other versions of El-Fish will
have almost identical requirements to 1.02.
The Mac OS version has been tested and
works on Power Mac (601 - 604 and G3).
The PC version may not run on Pentium
or later CPU's (you will need an old PC).

El-Fish: Copyright © 1993, Developed by AnimaTek, Published in the US by Maxis, Published in Europe by Mindscape.