ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER APRIL 1993 JOHN PHILLIPS by Bill Gaskill I would venture a guess that most people who have owned a TI-99 for more than a couple of years have run across the name John Phillips before. He is a near legend in the TI-99/4A cartridge and assembly language programming community and can claim authorship, co-authorship or significant involvement in over a dozen cartridge programs produced for the 99/4A, not to mention numerous articles written about the inner workings of the 4A's architecture. Phillips will be 32 years old this year (1993) but he was only 21 when he was hired by Texas Instruments in 1982 right after graduating from Illinois State University. He started his career with TI in Dallas doing COBAL programming for business applications but it took him only 6 months to get a requested transfer to Lubbock where the "real" action was. John had purchased a 99/4 during his senior year in college and was already familiar with the Home Computer's architecture and he had wanted to program video games since purchasing his first cartridge, which was Munchman. Phillips didn't know TMS9900 assembly language but it didn't take him long to learn it. His first project at Lubbock was Moonmine, followed by Hopper, which he co-authored with Michael Archulata. Hopper was followed by Word Radar, which he wrote in 2 weeks, for Developmental Learning Materials (DLM), the firm started by Bill Maxwell and Jerry Chaffin. After completing Word Radar TI sent Phillips to Japan where he met with several companies who were being recruited to write software for the 99/4A. Following his return from Japan he became involved in almost every piece of software that was slated for production or that was actually produced for the 99/4A. When TI announced the end of the Home Computer Division Phillips was offered several incentives to stay at TI but turned them all down because none involved work with the 99/4A. Instead, he and fellow employee Michael Archuleta went to work for DLM, which had continued to work on products for the TI-99/4A even though it was no longer being produced. In December 1983 John Phillips announced to the TI Community that he was available to any User Group for seminars, demonstrations and question and answer sessions related to the TI-99/4A. He would travel to virtually any location if the User Group would pay round trip airfare from Dallas, Texas plus lodging? While he could only make himself available on weekends, it was a pretty generous offer. Both Phillips and Archuleta eventually left DLM (probably because the work there dried up too) and started their own firm in February 1984 called Video Magic. Video Magic also came to an end in too short a time, I suspect because it was becoming painfully obvious that one could not make a living trying to write software for the 99/4A. At Texas Instruments Michael Archuleta was responsible for the 99/4A Technical Hotline and for 99/4A software quality assurance. Phillips was a third-party software development consultant and programmer in the education/entertainment section of the Consumer Products Division. Both men would get together again in 1986 to collaborate on the 4A FLYER game cartridge that was commissioned by Triton Products. To date, that is the last time we've heard from the John Phillips/Michael Archulata team. Archuleta and Phillips were involved in, or responsible for such TI-99 favorites as: ANGLER DANGLER - Phillips worked on this project as the debugger of the final code, but the project never reached completion before the bailout so Angler Dangler was never officially released. It does exist in GRAM file format however, so it probably was not too far from being a real product when someone at TI made the decision to pull the plug. If you look at the October 23, 1983 IUG price list you will see Angler Dangler listed as being available. BEYOND PARSEC - This cartridge, which Bill Moseid's DataBiotics firm released for the 99/4A during the third quarter of 1988, started life in early 1984 as one of two game cartridges John Phillips was writing for CorComp's new CCI-99/64 (aka Phoenix) computer. The other game was Star Wars. Both efforts came to a screaching halt however, when TI objected to the use of the Parsec name, and George Lucas' company apparently objected to the use of the trademarked Star Wars name. The Star Wars code must have actually been finished at the time though, because I have the game on disk as a GPL file. It was ultimately renamed Star Trap and released in cartridge form by Exceltec in 1985 and then by DataBiotics during the third quarter of 1988. BEYOND SPACE - This is a John Phillips creation that was completed in May 1984, but not released until the first quarter of 1985 when Exceltec/Sunware marketed it. It was picked up by Unisource Electronics for their catalog/encyclopedia but pretty much floundered and then just disappeared. It has never resurfaced since both Unisource and Sunware went out of business in 1986. The game involved two players with each having a ship of equal firing power. The area in space where the two ships confront each other is littered with asteroids which may be moved by firing the ship's laser. The object of the game was to push asteriods into your opponent's space ship to crush and destroy it. The only review I've ever seen written on the program claimed that its speed was too fast to play the game very long, so that may be why it has slipped into oblivion? BURGERTIME - Phillips provided the final debugging for Burgertime. D STATION - This John Phillips creation has the distinction of being the only program ever released by the International 99/4 User Group on the Romox ECPC cartridge. You may recall that during the fourth quarter of 1983, Charles LaFara promised "a library" of programs from the IUG on the Romox ECPC (Edge Connector Programmable Cartridge). D Station was just the first, but it also turned out to be the last. When the IUG ECPC library failed Exceltec (aka Sunware) picked up the program and marketed it for a short time in 1985. Triton finally introduced D Station in their Fall 1988 catalog along with a brand new D Station II game, also written by John Phillips. D STATION II - See D Station. FACEMAKER - Phillips collaborated with Intersoft's Jerry Spacek on this project. Spacek you may recall wrote Defend the Cities, which was the first commercial Mini-Memory assembly language game ever written. In the Facemaker project Spacek translated Spinnaker's source code to TMS9900 assembly language and Phillips ported it to cartridge format. HOPPER - Michael Archuleta and John Phillips co-wrote Hopper, which was the only cartridge developed entirely on the TI-99/4A Home Computer, using the Editor/Assembler cartridge for all of the programming. All of the other TI-99 cartridge software programs were developed on a TI Mini, not the 99/4 or 4A. JAWBREAKER II - Phillips converted the original Sierra On-Line source code to TI-99/4A code. MINI MEMORY'S LINE-BY-LINE ASSEMBLER - Phillips claims responsibility for its development, but I am not sure exactly what that means. MOONMINE - Programmed by John Phillips from a design by Bob Hendren. You may remember that Hendren was also the project engineer behind Parsec and the person who recruited Aubree Anderson to do the voice for the Parsec game. PETER PAN'S SPACE ODYSSEY - Phillips and Archuleta collaborated on this program while employed at DLM. It was never officially released but is available as a GRAM file that can be run from P-Gram, Gramulator or the GramKracker. SLYMOIDS - Slymoids was written by James R. Von Ehr II. The cartridge conversion was accomplished by John Phillips. STAR TRAP - See Beyond Parsec. SUPER DEMON ATTACK - Phillips worked on this project, but I have no information on the specific contributions he made to its completion other than possible debugging of the final code. I do know that he actually worked on Demon Attack, not Super Demon Attack, but they are probably the same project with the actual marketed product just having a slightly different name. THE GREAT WORD RACE- John Phillips authored. TREASURE ISLAND - Phillips provided the final debugging for this game cartridge, which had apparently become stalled by a bug that no one could find. WORD RADAR - John Phillips authored. .PL 1