-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Faherty [mailto:rallymonkey@bellsouth.net]
Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2000 1:19 AM
To: Dan Eicher
Subject: TI Interview
Question:
How did you get started with the TI?
I had an Atari 2600 for a few years, and after hearing a friend of mine
describe a Scott Adams "text" adventure I thought that having a computer
would let me do things like that. At the time I had no understanding about
programming, and in fact I have to laugh when I remember how clueless I was.
We waited until the 99/4A went on sale with the $100 rebate and I got one
the first day. For starters it was fun, but I remember getting very bored,
and once I saw a ColecoVision-ooh I really wanted that-it was too expensive
at the time so I stuck with my 2600 and the 99/4A. It was actually several
years before I decided I wanted to try writing some programs on it.
Then there came a point at which I understood the parts of a computer and
how it worked, and that allowed me to finally start to write and debug my
own programs. Before then, I had always asked my dad to write a few lines
of code that, for example, made a character on the screen move around. I
couldn't even understand that code, mostly because I hadn't learned how
screen things are represented by coordinates-perhaps I should have paid more
attention in school.
How did you make the jump from Basic to Assembler?
I had always been a subscriber to the TI Users Group, and a gentleman by the
name of Bill Gronos wrote a column which became a tutorial on TI Assembler.
For an unmemorable reason I owned a Mini Memory module which allowed me to
type the code contained in Bill's articles. His code had appeal to me
because it would always show how quickly Assembler could draw characters on
the screen, or how the screen could be scrolled without seeing a slow wave.
Since I was a kid and I basically wanted to write games, using Assembler was
what I wanted to do. My system was pretty bare boned; a 99/4A, cassette,
and a Mini Memory module. After enduring some frustration with that line by
line Assembler (Mini Memory), I believe I purchased the Extended Basic
module and played around with sprites for a while; submitting a Frogger
clone and some other space game to the TI-UG in exchange for other user
software.
My first third-party software purchase was an Assembler which was written
*in* Basic. I can't remember the name of it, but it was trick! You would
write your assembly code line by line, and you could save several hundred
lines in modules which you would dump to cassette. So it was the
availability of that Assembler and Bill's column which led to my using
Assembler for everything from that point.
What kind of collaboration happened between you and your dad?
Back then the kids owned the computers, and the parents didn't touch them.
So most of the collaboration in the early 80's involved me crying to my dad
when I broke something. The computer moved from the living room, where I
had to share the TV with the family, into my room where it grew into 1,000
points of light as I added the "peripheral" box.
In 1988 we each had our own TI computer, and he write TI-Base. I really
wasn't paying attention at the time, and I think he wrote it very quickly
while we were in the process of moving into a new home in Florida. I got
him hooked on Al Beard's cross-assembler and we shared a few tools on the
PC.. I guess we both had PC clones at the time but they weren't
particularly fun.
How old were you when you wrote TI-Artist?
It was finished in 1985 but it took a long time, almost a year to write, so
I was 16 during the most part. TI-Artist Plus! was written in 1989, and
that took another 9 months; I'm actually really proud of that because I
learned a bunch during that session.
What gave you the start to want to write TI-Artist?
Well TI-Artist started out as a clone of Atari Artist, which itself was a
clone of the software which came with a Koala pad. I saw that program on my
friend's Atari 800 and I somehow got a screenshot of it and a description of
how to use it. Then I tried to code the same thing for the TI.
We already had some drawing software on the TI, which I used to draw
TI-Artist's icons. I think it was called Draw-A-Bit or something like that.
It was a program which used hotkeys for everything, and had some strange
recording features. I found the interface to be a little unforgiving and
that was the main thing I wanted to fix with TI-Artist.
With version 2 of TI-Artist I added the ability to load clipart, which due
to many third-party tools and donations became popular. Working with Steve
Lamberti and Dave Rose, we had a pretty good collection of fonts and
clipart.
Millions of (especially assembler) programs have been started for the TI, it
is a rare individual that was actually able to bring it to completion, what
do you feel was the main drive that actually separated you from the crowd?
I had tons of people who supported me. Obviously being a kid I didn't have
to worry about a job, but it was my parents and friends who let me lean on
them. I can't name them all; Bill McAdams, Steve Carstensen, Randall
Rainey, Bud Schuilling, Phil Simerly, Steve Lamberti. And though I don't
know them personally; Charles Lafara, Bill Gronos, John Phillips, Lou
Phillips.
But I don't think I was any different from the crowd. Perhaps because I
kept making TI-Artist versions over the years when I really should have been
working on something else. Thinking back, I found it exciting because it
was something that people wanted and it was fun to pump out disk copies.
I know many people were hoping, but did you ever consider adding 9938
support in TI-Artist?
Yeah just to have the higher resolution would have been cool. I think I
tried and failed several times to add features, though not specifically 9938
support. I believe at one time I tried to make a TI-Artist stand alone
cartridge with Bill McAdam's help, but I failed miserably to get it done
because I had under-designed the cartridge and couldn't squeeze enough into
the 256 words of RAM.
Getting back to your question, I never became familiar with the Geneve
architecture to be able to convert TI-Artist into a codebase which would
support new features. For the 99/4A there was no room left at all for
changing the code, at least not in the Artist portion. I recall looking at
the code several years ago, and unfortunately it looks as if it were written
by a 16 year old.
How did the external DSR option come about, what did you interface?
Is that cool or what! When I look back and see that I put that into version
1 I am very proud. At the time I think we had a couple of mice that you
could hook up to the 99/4A and so I decided that I should just make the
input device into a separate object file. I never did get my Macintosh
mouse going very good, but I believe others such as Mike Dodd wrote drivers
which worked for the other mice. I recall that we also had a Super Sketch
thing and that was also interfaced to TI-Artist using the input device
driver specification.
What was the biggest technical hurdle that you ever overcome on the TI?
RAM. The console itself had only enough CPU addressable RAM to hold a few
variables. The 16K of RAM in the console was video RAM and not directly
addressable by the CPU in order to execute code. So what we did was split
the program into large sections which it had to load from disk into the same
memory space. With TI-Base my dad used an entirely different method in
which each command's code was stored in a database record; no wonder it was
so slow.
What gave you the biggest feeling of accomplishment?
With TI-Artist Plus I did a Vector section which allowed scaling and
rotation of bitmaps. Hard to believe I ever got that crappy code to work
since when I look today at the industry standard way of doing that stuff, I
was doing it all wrong! So my perseverance in coding that section
completely wrong and yet achieving my result makes me very proud.
What is your most memorable TI moment?
I would have to say, the first time I attended the Chicago TI Fair. A bunch
of us drove from Maryland in a van and they all helped me with my booth to
debut TI-Artist. I was a wreck during the show, but it couldn't have turned
out better for me.
What was your favorite piece of TI hardware?
I had lots of fun with the Peripheral box, and lots of fun with the speech
synthesizer. But I still think the Mini Memory module is the coolest thing
because it was such a precursor to how we do things today. The software in
it was okay, a line by line Assembler, but the cool thing is how it had 4K
of battery backed RAM. So you could store programs and data on it and use
it on other consoles without losing anything. It was like an ancient
version of compact flash.
What was your favorite piece of software that you didn't write?
I'd like to say TI's Editor/Assembler because it really set the tone of how
software could be written professionally. But I can't forget to mention Al
Beard's fantastic cross-assembler, which was in no small part responsible
for the development of TI-Artist Plus and the later developments of TI-Base.
But then also at that time we all got modems and used the BBS all day. So
it was the TE-II and Paul Charlton's FastTerm which I liked. It was later
that Telco came along, which I used for transferring binary files between
the PC and TI.
I also have to mention TI-Forth which showed that 64 characters really could
fit on a TV screen. And it put me on a crusade to fit 80 characters on the
TV, which makes me laugh because I was trying to make 3-pixel wide
characters which were unintelligible. Ironic because I was trying to make
an 80 column terminal program which I thought was required for using a BBS
properly, but nowadays I often use sub 40 character PDA/Pagers to view Web
content.
During your development days, did you develop any development tools to aid
you? Did you use any third party tools?
I wasn't good enough to develop programming tools. But I used Al Beard's
excellent cross-assembler when I started TI-Artist Plus. Without it, I
would not have been able to get anything done.
Who was your favorite TI personality?
Boy we had lots of them. At the time we had the spokesman Bill Cosby and
that was fun. I remember that Commodore had William Shatner for the Vic-20
and, and who was it for the Atari, I think Alan Alda or maybe not. People
that I met; Terry Masters, Craig Miller, Lou Phillips, Paul Charlton, Peter
Hoddie, Mike Dodd, and many others who I know as friends rather than
acquaintances. I wish I had been able to meet Charles Lafara, because his
TI User's Group is what started it for me. But I'd have to say that Bill
Gronos was my favorite because of his encouraging columns, and his excellent
Cubit game.
How did you get involved with the Geneve?
I met Lou Phillips at a show in New Jersey I believe. I agreed to write a
GUI for the upcoming Geneve but I really was poor at designing things and I
figured I would have to code BIOS routines for the video. That took me a
long time, and as it turned out I should have obviously worked on something
more within my talent area, which is applications development.
I know that you had a few lesser known programs, one I remember was a cool
looking GUI for an EPROM programmer. Can you tell me more about this one and
are there any more treasures that I don't know about? I remember something
about a module you wrote?
EPROM-It was the program name. That was a hardware/software project that
Bill McAdams and I did. He was an electrical engineer and when he designed
and built an EPROM programmer device, I helped by writing the code to
operate it from the TI-it was parallel port based.
I think my first commercial program was released through The Softspot by
Phil Simerly, it was called Floppy Copy. Basically it was a generic sector
copier which at the time was handy. The bad part was that we agreed on a
copy protection scheme that involved using bad sectors on the disk, and the
testing at startup caused a noisy grunt from the drive stepping mechanism.
Not my best idea by any means.
The module fiasco. I got this idea that I wanted TI-Artist to run entirely
off a console + cartridge module without requiring any RAM expansion. Bill
designed a module with some RAM and ROM paging and I worked on modularizing
the software to run in the 8K segments. Problem was, we under-designed the
hardware and I was still stuck with the 256 words of RAM because we made the
module RAM/ROM paging mutually exclusive in the 8K space instead of 4K/4K.
Well I tried trimming things down but never got close to fitting variables
into 256 words, and the end result was a failure. To top it off, the beige
consoles didn't like our module for some timing reason we never looked into.
What are you and your dad doing these days?
My dad is semi-retired though he still does programming work in Pascal. I
do various things and for the past two years I've been a day trader. Most
of my programming work involves writing better stock cockpit software, and
writing freeware applications for the PalmPilot and RIM Blackberry pager.
http://rallypilot.sourceforge.net/
http://rallypilot.sourceforge.net/bb/index.html
If you had had unlimited time and money, what program would you have liked
to have written for the TI?
I am having a hard time with this question. I zipped right through the
others but this one is making me think too hard. So many of my projects
were left unfinished, but it wasn't due to time nor money; I just pooped
out. I remember starting several games, a CAD program, a desktop publisher,
a terminal program, and even a BBS-but I never got any of them working.
I would say that I had started writing everything I wanted, but my skills
weren't up to the task. In answer to your question, I will just pick one of
those projects which would have been pretty cool if I had finished it; the
CAD program.