The following is an e-mail interview I gave to Dan Eicher, who wanted to publish it in the Chicago TImes Newsletter. I haven't seen the published version, so I don't know whether Dan did any editorial changes (for which he had my permission). What follows is the original answers I sent him. I just added an few update, in italics, when things had changed since January 2001.
And in case you are wondering what I look like, here is a mug shot.
Now, let's move to are Dan's questions:
How and when did you get started with the TI?
How did you make the jump from Basic to Assembler or
Basic
to GPL?
Have you ever worked with any other TIer's on a
project?
How old were you when you wrote first
assembly
or GPL program on the TI?
What made you want to write a GPL development
system,
instead of say a Terminal Emulator or Pascal compiler?
What is your favorite application written in
GPL?
If you could go back in time, what change
would
have you made to the TI OS or hardware?
Do you think, if TI would have created a
GPL
development system - like the E/A package, we would have had
more/better
software?
What tools do you use to create your software?
What provided you with the spark to create your
website?
What are the major differences
between your
GPL development system and the Weiand and Green Package?
Why do you suppose to made such a poor
loader
and how do your loaders improve upon it.
Do you know who designed the original
GPL language?
What do you think of the SNUG High Speed Gpl Card,
both in concept and implementation?
If someone wanted to learn GPL, what route
would
you recommend they take to get started?
Is it my imagination, but does GPL based
software
do a much better job at I/O handling then Assembly?
Do you think GPL was the right choice
for
TI to write Disk Manager II and / or Video Chess?
What do you think about Monte
Schmidts linker
that allows you to run GPL code from RAM instead of GRAM/GROM?
Have you ever considered using the load
interupt
with your debug software?
Can you sum up how your debuggers work?
What gave you the biggest feeling of
accomplishment?
What is your most memorable TI moment?
What was your favorite piece of TI
hardware?
What was your favorite piece of software that
you
didn't write?
Who was/is your favorite TI personality?
Were you active in any users group in Europe?
Are there any software or hardware projects you
are currently working on?
A little about yourself! What are your hobbies?
What is your professional training?
What is better/or worse about living in the states?
Th.N: It was around 1983, I was in med school doing a rotation in the urological surgery department. The other rotating student was a TI-99/4A fan and he told me so much about it that I decided to buy one. He knew a place in his hometown where to buy a cheap console, so I borrowed my sister's car, drove 40 miles and bought my first TI-99/4A. When I brought it home, everyone was quite excited: it was the first computer we ever had at home. My aunt donated a huge black and white TV (the kind that still worked with tubes!) and I must admit it was quite nice to work with such a big screen.
After a while, I got tired of the sluggish cassette tape interface and decided to buy a PE-box. I purchased a second-hand, fully loaded box, with memory expansion, disk drive and controller, RS232 card and p-code card. I remember I paid around $1000 for it, and at that time it was considered a good deal!
A few years later, my console started acting up. The first time, I was able to get it repaired through the store I purchased it from, but the second time they considered it beyond rescue. So I placed a classified ad in a local newspaper, but these guys misstyped my phone number in the ad, and only a few people were smart enough to call the newspaper and ask for the correct number. One of them was the kid I bought my new console from (after surprising his mom topless in her backyard). Another was Rudolf Scheffer then president of the CCTI, a swiss TI-99/4A computer club. He offered me to join the club, which I did.
Unfortunately, it was not a very active club. Still, we had a newsletter, a software library and sometimes good offers on hardware. It's through the club that I bought the german 128K Gram-Karte.
When the CCTI drifted towards a PC and Amiga club, I found a new TI-99/4A community: the newsgroup comp.sys.ti, which I'm still browsing on a daily basis. I got my Horizon Ramdisk from somemone advertising it on this newsgroup.
Finally, in December 1996 I moved to the USA and had to leave my TI system behind (too heavy, and won't work on US power supply anyhow). I got myself a PC and learned C++, but I was still missing my old TI-99/4A. So after a year or two I bought a complete system for $100. They guy I got it from had been less carefull with it that I was with mine, and probably let it rust in his garage for a while. As a result, I often experience crashes and I still can't manage to get the disk drive to read the last 10 tracks on any floppy! Of course, by that time my old system was also beginning to rust in my dad's garage. So the next time I went to Switzerland, I brought back my Ramdisk, Gramcard, speech synthesizer and all I could pack into my suitcase. Then United lost the suitcase!!! They finally found it, heavily damaged, but fortunately none of the hardware had suffered.
Th.N: I always wanted to try my hand at assembly, but the guy I bought my PE-box from wanted an extra $400 for the cartridge and I couldn't afford it. Fortunately, the p-code card came with an assembler, so that's how I got started with this language.
Later on, once I had a Gram card, I cloned the Editor/Assembler module in it (yeah I know it's illegal, but TI was done with the TI-99/4A anyhow). I had no manual and had to figure out most of the tips and tricks myself. This had some consequences on my programming style: for instance I don't use R for registers. This is because you must specify an option for the assembler to accept the R notation and I didn't know about it!
I finally bought a book on assembly programming, but by that time I had figured out most of what was in the book. A much more usefull reference was instruction manual for MG's Explorer.
Th.N: Not really. I have served as a beta tester, and others have tested my softwares but I never embarked on any collaborative venture. When I was a member of the CCTI, I tried to interest other members in assembly language, my dream being to create a C compiler (I didn't know of Clint Pulley's by then). I even wrote an article in our newsletter to encourage people taking up assembly. I'm afraid I wasn't too convincing...
I kind of regret it: working with guys like Micheal Becker would have been a lot of fun, I assume. On the other hand, it's probably better for the other guys that I didn't! You see, I tend to work on several projects at a time, to leave one on the back burner when I get tired of it, and to come back later... years later in some cases. Let's see, how many projects fell from the back burner into the deep freezer by now? 1) A music editor, 2) A graphic disk doctor, 3) A semi-graphic user interface (featured in my GPL package, in the List Editor and in MISS), 4) An stud-poker playing program (with bluff capabilities, human psychology appraisal and a self-improvement routine), 5) A multitasking package, for both assembly and Extended Basic. And the list goes on.
NB I actually completed and released the multitasking package. You can find it on this site.
In most cases once I have written the core routines, the tricky part of the program, I get bored of doing the final polishing and move to another, more interesting project. This bad habit would have driven any coworker crazy.
Th.N: I'm not sure. Assembly must have been around 1985, so I was 24. GPL came later, since I had to write my own assembler for it. Probably at age 26 or 27.
Which allows you to calculate that I am now 40, or will be on February 4. And you know what? I just love the idea. It looks like each decade in my life was better that the previous one and I can't wait to see how great the fourties will be!
Th.N: When I bought my GRAM card, I was quite pissed off to discover that it did not come with a GPL assembler. There were a few demo source files, but the assembler costed extra money. I couldn't afford buying it on top of what I spent for the card, so I decided to write my own assembler. I deduced the syntax from the source files, from Heiner Martin's book "TI-99/4A Intern" and by stepping through the GPL interpreter with Millers Graphics' Explorer.
This first GPL assembler was fairly basic and clumsy, so a few years later I set out to write a better one. Once I was almost done, someone sent me the one by R.A. Green. This came as a shock for me! I must confess that I would never have written mine if I had gotten my hands on the RAG one first. As it was, I needed little work to finish mine, so I decided to go ahead and release it.
The irony is, I never really used it much. The only two applications that I ever wrote in GPL (that deserve to be called programs) are:
Th.N: That would probably be Extended Basic. But of course, that's not pure GPL: there is quite a bit of assembly in this cartridge.
Th.N: Hardware: the data bus multiplexing from 16-bit to 2 times 8-bit. That's in my opinion the worst design mistake TI ever did with this machine. I understand the historical context: the TI-99 was designed around an 8-bit processor that was never produced, so TI engineers took the 16-bit TMS9900 and tailored it down to fit their design. They were smart enough to at least install the console ROMs as 16-bit memory, but that's about it. Why not go all the way and make the TI-99/4A a real 16-bit computer? Beats me.
And while we are at it, why not make use of the 16 interrupts levels? The TMS9900 has the required input pins, the TMS9901 the required output pins. It was such a simple matter to connect them. And yet they decided not to do it...
As for the OS, I think they did a pretty good job. What I would definitely change is the way the interrupts are handled. There are 3 possible sources of interrupt in the system: the VDP, the peripheral cards, and the internal countdown timer in the TMS9901. Even without any hardware modification, it would be a simple matter to determine where the interrupt came from and to react accordingly. Yet that's not what the interrupt routine does. Instead, it relies on a flag set by the user to decide either that all interrupts come from the timer, or that none does! What's worse, the timer interrupt routine consistently overwrites the return address, which means that you cannot return from such an interrupt.
Th.N: Not necessarily. The problem here is that GPL can only run in special memory chips (GROMs) that were not readily available. Even if TI had sold cheap GROMs by the bucket, together with the appropriate programming device, it still would be inconvenient to develop a GPL program. Can you imagine, burning a new chip each time you change a line in your program?
What you need is GRAM, but there is no such thing. The so-called GRAM cards contain regular RAM and a sophisticated circuit that mimics the behaviour of a GROM, at least in part.
Now, if TI had released a GRAM card or an emulator like Monte Schmidts', which lets you test your GPL program from standard memory, then maybe we would have a lot of excellent GPL programs around. But I always suspected that GROMs were part of a marketing plot by TI, to avoid software piracy. So obviously, they were not going to promote GRAM cards!
Now, there is a new exciting possibility around: Joakim Langlet has written a TMS9900 assembler, linker and librarian that run on a PC (www.seaview.se/index_eng.htm). You could write your assembly programs in a nice integrated development environment, such as Microchip's MPLAB, assemble them at lightning speed and transfer them to the TI-99/4A for test purposes via a connection cable. I may well switch to this system in the future.
Th.N: A few years ago my youger sister and her husband offered me a domain name (www.nouspikel.com) as a Christmas present. I put my picture and my resume on it and then wondered, what else am I gonna put in there? I started typing a few pages about things I found interesting in the TI-99/4A: the interrupts, the CRU, etc. And then my anal retentiveness kicked in, and I thought: "no way I can go public with such a primitive site". So I went on typing in the info I had on the various processors, and little by little I built a more comprehensive site. I must admit that sometimes it's kind of boring to type in all these technical details, but on the other hand it forces me to really understand the manuals.
The site is still growing, mainly thanks to the help of readers that send me the technical info I am still missing. It's currently hosted by Stanford University and can be accessed there directly (www.stanford.edu/~thierry1/ti99/titechpages.htm) or through my domain name (www.nouspikel.com/ti99/titechpages.htm). As the company that handles the domain name is based in the UK, the first URL is probably faster for north-american users.
Th.N: All are based on the Weiand syntax and, as I said, the RAG assembler is excellent.
My package offers a few extras, that you may or may not have a use for:
Th.N: My guess is, they wanted to keep it small so the user had as much memory available for his program as possible. The price to pay was to leave aside a number of nifty features provided by the assembler, such a segmented programming.
This leads to another problem, the proliferation of loaders: one for tagged-object files, one for EA5 format, one for tagged-object GPL, one for GRAM-Kracker files, etc. The McGoverns did a nice job of integrating about six assembly loaders in Funnelweb, but they did not address GPL.
My own attempts include two loaders:
Yet I agree this is not perfect. I'd like to see support for dynamic loading of program segments, in a "overlay" or "DLL" manner, i.e. loading a chunk of code when your program needs it, wherever there is room available.
Note by D.E: FWIW - Jeff Brown was working on a loader he called the chunk loader that would load large segments in any available memory.
Th.N: I haven't the faintest idea. I also wonder who came up with the prefix "Graphic" since there is nothing so graphic in GPL, nor in GROMs.
Th.N: I heard a lot of good things about it, but I don't have one so it's hard for me to make an opinion. Let's say that what I heard of it makes my mouth water. If anybody has one for sale, by all means let me know.
NB I got one now, thanks to Richard Bell. It's a bit disapointing hardware-wise because everything is handled by the FPGA chip: not much for me to fool around with. But the card itself is great. Michael surely diserves the many awards he got for this card.
I got in touch with Michael Becker and asked him for schematics and/or technical details, but he wasn't too keen about it. Too bad: the guy is one of my personal heros. I mean, he and his buddies design a new card every 2-3 years, can you imagine?
Th.N: It's your imagination :) Actually, the GPL "I/O" instruction is pretty clumsy. The only I/O that's easier in GPL is writing to the screen. And then again, it only works in standard mode (32 columns, etc), with all the VDP tables at fixed locations, etc.
Th.N: OK, there are good and bad reasons to use GPL. A really bad reason is to turn a cartridge into a big dongle to prevent the user from illegally copying a program. A typical example of this strategy is the TI-Writer cartridge. All the cartridge does (apart from a tiny disk catalog routine and storing foreing language characters and prompts) is to launch the Editor or the Formater from disk. You don't need GPL for that. As a matter of fact, I wrote a crack many years ago, in which a tiny assembly program was doing the same job.
So are there good reasons to program in GPL? Since it's an interpreted language, it is bound to be slower than assembly. On the other hand, it is slightly more compact and easier to use (ok, the latter may not be a good reason to choose a language).
But the main advantage of GPL is that it resides in a different memory. As you know, the TI-99/4A address space is limited to 64K, of which cartridges only get 8K (although some cartridges page the last 4K, but let's not go there for now). On the other hand, each GROM base address opens access to 64K of memory (40K if you don't want to overwrite the console GROMs, 30K if you install 6K-GROMs every 8K, as TI used to do). Now, the console ROM routines will scan sixteen GROM bases, which adds up to 1 megabyte! And nothing prevents you from using more than 16 bases, provided that you don't put DSRs or CALLs in these. So, one good reason to use GPL is to pack more software in a cartridge. Chess and Extended Basic are good examples of this strategy. It's less clear for Disk Manager: a priori, it could just as well be written in assembly.
Th.N: Sounds like a good idea. It lets you experiment with GPL without having to buy/build a GRAM device. However, it's bound to have limitations as far as the size of the program that you can write, since both the program and the interpreter must fit in the memory expansion.
Th.N: Of course I did! That's the main idea behind my RIP debuggers: trigger an interrupt that cannot be ignored, so the debugger gains control no matter how badly locked up your program is.
Th.N: RIP version 1 is a post-mortem debugger. You trigger it after your program has crashed and it lets you inspect memory and registers to determine what went wrong.
RIP version 2 has the same abilities, but in addition is also works like a traditional debugger: it inserts breakpoints in your program and kicks in when one of these breakpoints is reached. Since I wanted to use as little memory as I could, it runs within the Horizon Ramdisk DSR space and only needs about 30 bytes in the high memory expansion. Unfortunately, when I moved to the USA and reinstalled it on my Ramdisk, I discovered a nasty bug that makes user input quite awkward. I've just been too busy (or too lazy) to fix it yet
RIP version 3 will be a remote debugger. You load a tiny routine anywhere in memory, and connect your TI-99/4A to the debugging computer (likely a PC) via a connection cable that could go either to the PIO port, the cassette port, or the joystick port. Then you run your program on the TI-99/4A and debug it from the PC. At least that's the idea, I have barely started working on it.
Module Explorer is a lift of the GPL interpreter, modified so that you can execute one instruction at a time, edit the memory, etc. Its look-and-feel is purposedly reminiscent of Millers Graphics Explorer and it's one of the softs I'm most proud of.
Th.N: That was probably the day I realized that my IDE card was working. I always wanted to create a hard-disk interface for the TI-99/4A, but did not really believe I could succeed. Of course, the IDE standard made things quite easy, by having the controller inside the drive instead of on the interface board.
Th.N: Each time I get my hands on a new piece of hardware, or discover a really nice software, is a memorable moment.
Th.N: The Horizon Ramdisk. It's an extremely valuable piece of hardware that saved me a lot of time. Its design is very elegant in its simplicity. And ROS 8.14, the operating system, is just wonderfully written.
Th.N: Millers Graphics Explorer, by D.C. Warren. It's the king of all debuggers. Actually it's more than a debugger, it's an emulator: it emulates the TMS9900 microprocessor on the TI-99/4A itself. This brilliant design lets you step through code in ROM (where a regular debugger cannot place breakpoints), set breakpoints on VDP or GROM memory addresses, etc. The manual is beautifully written and contains a lot of extremely usefull information, a tutorial, etc. Last but not least, it comes with an interesting protection scheme, that's quite educational to crack. Yes, I hacked it! Not for the money since I legally bought it, but just for the learning experience. And I'm glad I did it: after all these years, the floppy is so worn out that Explorer won't load of it. But the hacked version sits in my Ramdisk and loads in less than 2 seconds!
Some of my other favorite programs include:
As you see, there are no games on my list as I'm not very found of computer games. I played a few with my 6 years old nephew, and we both liked Parsec, Slymoids and some of the Atari games, but my heart goes to utilities, not games.
Th.N: Ok, so you want my list of personnal heros? There are many. For software matters, any of the guys who wrote the above programs: D.C. Warren (Explorer), R.A. Green (linker, assembler, GPL assembler, GUMS, etc), Tony and Will McGovern (Funnelweb), Barry Boone (SoundFX, Archiver III), John Birdwell (DISKU), Clint Pulley & Winfried Winkler (small C), Joakim Langlet (PC-based assembler and linker), etc.
For hardware matters, probably Michael Becker. He's just so productive. And the Horizon Ramdisk designer: Ron Gries.
For TI community matters, Rich Polivka, because of his great website.
Th.N: Yeah, I was an early member of the Swiss CCTI (computer club TI-99/4A). Unfortunately, after a few years it became a PC/TI club, then an PC/Atari/TI club. I still remember the general assembly when we voted to create the PC section: I had the distinct feeling that the TI-99/4A section was doomed, but there was no point going against the flow. And of course, that's exactly what happened: as far as I know the club still exists, but is now headed by Eric Scheffer (the president's son) and is almost exclusively geared towards PC. Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course.
Th.N: Hardware: as already mentionned, I have designed an IDE interface card. It can handle two 128-gigabyte drives, and has a 512K SRAM chip on board to store the DSRs and buffer the opened files (the rest of the memory is available to the user via the RAMBO protocol). It also carries a real-time clock, so as to time-stamp the files. The clock chip I selected has 4K of battery-backed RAM, which I'm using to store a boostrap program that loads the DSRs into the SRAM upon power up.
My next project will probably be a memory expansion board. But first I have to complete yet another ongoing project, not related to the TI-99/4A: a sensory chessboard, controlled by a PIC microprocessor, with LCD screen, voice chip, clock, flash-memory, etc.
Software: I'm busy writing the DSRs for the IDE card, but once this is done I really want to release this multitasking package of mines. Possibly also the semi-graphic interface, if I can muster the energy. Then there will be the remote debugger. Then I'd like to make another attempt at a real good loader, that would handle segment programming, memory expansion boards, GPL, etc.
NB. Both the IDE software and the multitasking package are now ready and available from this site.
Th.N: I'm a swiss citizen. This means I was born in Switzerland, not Sweden, OK? And no, it's not in southern Africa: that would be Swaziland (sorry, couldn't resist).
I was trained as a MD, but never actually practiced medicine, since I found out in med school that I loved research much better than clinics. So I got myself a Ph.D. in biology and I'm currently working on DNA repair at Stanford University. And I can tell you guys, research is the most fascinating game there is. I'd do if for free, if I had to (but don't tell my boss).
My hobbies include, as you might have guessed, computer programming (TI-99/4A and PC. I hate these unreliable MacIntosh) and digital electronics.
When I moved to the States, I took up martial arts: first Aikido and japanese swordsmanship, more recently Kenpo. I try to train 5 or 6 days a week, which tends to keep me away from my TI-99/4A, unfortunately.
I'm very found of classical music, as a listener not a performer. I tried for years to learn how to play the piano, but was really miserable at it. Maybe one day I'll try the guitar... In the meantime I'm learning japanese, just for the fun of it.
NB I did try the guitar... with not much success but I'm still working on it.
Th.N: What do I like about living in Silicon Valley?
What I don't like:
