Paul Urbanus

Pual Urbanus was a summer intern working at Texas Instruments with Jim Dramis. He helped Jim program Parsec. Paul eventually went on to work at Atarisoft and worked on the games Jungle Hunt and Pole Position for the TI-99/4A as well.

Story of the Urbite

I found an article in a publication titled "Yesterday's News" from October 2016 written by Paul Urbanus that I include here. The article may have been published before in another publication and republished in "Yesterday's News", but I couldn't find an earlier publication of it. Here is that article in its entirety:

Story of the Urbite

by Paul Urbanus

I would like to clarify and correct some of the statements made in the original posting of the below article. To help substantiate comments, I will start with a history of my relationship with the TI-99/4A Home Computer.

I was hired by TI in December of 1979 as a coop student, and spent six months working for the Home Computer Division of TI in Lubbock. During this time, I did such diverse things as gather statistics on the distribution of data in the various GROM chips and program an HP test station to verify that the RF modulators were meeting FCC and TI specifications. In my spare time, I purchased a surplus IBM terminal keyboard (a really nice one) and interfaced it to the 99/4. This was the first REAL keyboard for the 99/4. I even added logic to do auto-repeat and mapped the IBM cursor keys to function correctly. My coop term expired, the fun ended, and I went back to school (New Mexico State University) for a year.

I returned to TI in Lubbock in the summer of 1981 to serve a second stint as a coop student (and earn some money!). In my absence, the TI-99/4 had undergone puberty and blossomed into the TI-99/4A. In addition to the new keyboard, there was also a new video chip. The TM9918 had been replaced by the TM9918A. At this point several things were happening, and the confluence thrust me into a rather unique position at TI.

My first assignment was to perform some testing of the new video chip and plot a chart of chip operations versus supply voltage and temperature. While waiting for the temperature chamber to stabilize during these test, I was reading the detailed chip specifications and came to a startling discovery -- there was a new graphics mode in this chip which would allow neat new applications. At the same time, the Editor/Assembler (E/A) cartridge was in the early stages of alpha (internal) testing. I used the E/A cartridge to play around with the new graphics mode (Graphics Mode II). One of the first programs I wrote was a simple line-drawing program which was bundled with the Mini Memory module.

After I wrote the Lines program, management moved me from the hardware to the R&D group and suggested that I collaborate with Jim Dramis on a new game. I thought this was better than sex (OK, I WAS kinda naive) -- getting paid to write a video game. Just for reference, Jim had written some of the best TI games available at that point -- Car Wars and Munch Man. We quickly agreed that we wanted to write a space game and we wanted to have smooth horizontal scrolling to give the illusion of flying over the surface of a planet. As some of you may know, there is NO hardware support for scrolling the screen on a pixel basis in the 99/4A video chip. After lot's of pondering, I hit upon a solution -- copy the inner loop of the scroll code into the fast 16-bit RAM of the 99/4A. Since this code is responsible for 80% of the execution time of the scroll loop, substantial speed gains were made by moving the loop to fast RAM. In today's world of 486s and Pentiums, this RAM would be referred to as cache RAM. I then handed this code off the Jim so he could incorporate it into the game.