Barry Boone
Programmer Extraordinaire
Barry Boone
Programmer Extraordinaire
Barry Boone has been one very busy TI99er. Among the projects accomplished by Barry are:
- Wrote Archiver II followed by Archiver 3.03 (a total rewrite which was much faster as a single step process using LZ compression) which became the standard archiver in the TI-99/4A community;
- Wrote EXEC which is a utility for MDOS that allows you to run 99/4A EA5 type programs directly from the command line of MDOS, without having to load GPL first;
- Wrote SYSTEX which saves XB machine language programs/utilities as XB Program files;
- The disassembling of Infocom's interpreter and fixing a number of bugs, plus the making of an 80 column version of the interpreter. Once the interpreter was fixed, he ported an additional dozen Infocom games to the TI. This was all the result of his being a huge fan of the Infocom games;
- Dumped many things to disk format, such as the Tunnels of Doom, which was very challenging to do given its size. It was very difficult to do a GPL interpreter with all the ROMs in memory without using a Supercart, but it was done with 8 bytes to spare;
- Ported a number of Tomy Tutor games to the Geneve;
- Wrote a track copier, a popular E/A #5 loader, Sound F/X, GIF Mania, a Myart viewer, and a GIF viewer for the Geneve that used all 256 colors;
- Debugged and improved firmware behind the scenes for many aftermarket products, including both the Mechatronic and Dijit Systems 80 column cards;
- Many other projects which were never released, such as a set of CALL LINK routines to run the MBX system from XB, a set of CALL LINK routines for XB to utilize the 9938's hi-res mode, and do hardware-based graphic operations.
As a teenager, Barry was assisted in many of these projects with the help of a single step board that some company at the dawn of the TI once produced (the company ran ads in early copies of 99’er). It was a sidecar device with 8K of RAM that could be switched into the cart space, and had a load interrupt switch and a hardware debounce for the load interrupt, and was compatible with single step mode in TI's debugger. In addition, Barry created a modified version of TI’s RSBUG software that he often used when the 99/4A was in a non-text mode. This allowed full debugging from his VT100 terminal.
Barry was an assistant SysOp on GEnie, and also spent a lot of time with a Sysop account on Compuserve's TI Forum. Barry's handle on BBSes was "The Master". He also used it on ported programs when he didn't want his name revealed. People can probably remember seeing "Broken 19## by The Master" in other software that he was involved with.
Barry took a job at Creative Labs in 1993 (doing tech support and running their support BBS) and was there until late 1998 managing their global WAN network and Internet servers/routers. In 1999 Barry started an Internet company that does online deals and coupons, and has been doing that ever since.
