Mr Speaker

Just when I thought the Boon related posting had come to an end, and I had headed back to my nerdy roots - he's back. Yes, it's true. Boony Lives. And thanks to an oversight by the Boony developers, it looks like he is here to stay!

We'll delve a little further into the how and the why - and show you how to make your Boony live forever...

What's going on?

Well, thanks to the AWESOME technical wizardry of Tim on the "Reverse Boonjaneering" project we know that Boony worked on a counter. The counter started at zero, and went up every 5 minutes. This way Talking Boony knew when the he should wake up and when he should got to sleep. So, for example, when the counter hit 2000 it was the start of game 1 of the VB series - 13th of January 2006.

But the series eventually came to an end, and we were told that Boony was to go to sleep forever.

There was just one little oversight. The designers of Talking Boony had taken a lot of effort to conserve the three AAA batteries inside Boony to last out the series. And they did. Long after the series was over the counter inside Boony continued to increase every five minutes until, like an awesome game of Galaga, the highest counter value was reached.

In this case the value was 32767 (7FFF hexadecimal if you are that way inclined). Five minutes after that, the counter had no where to go but back to zero. It must have been reached a few weeks back actually, because on the 7th of May the counter made it's way back up to the value that Boony knows as Game 1 of the VB series. Mistakenly thinking it was 13th of January he sprang to life, filling our ears with Boony witticisms!

So what now?

Well, MarkW has provides us an update of the days Boony thinks games are on, and the codewords Boony should be spoutin' and the end of each day :
May 07 = Jan 13 - Bat
May 09 = Jan 15 - Ball
May 11 = Jan 17 - VB
May 14 = Jan 20 - Cheers
May 16 = Jan 22 - Slab
May 18 = Jan 24 - Stubby
May 20 = Jan 26 - Thirsty
May 23 = Jan 29 - Legend

There are some finals to look our for too!

But what then? Is he gone forever?

No way! Holby tells us he'll be back every 113.776 days! The only problem is the batteries will probably die before we get that far. And according to this Talking Boony article, the owner of Veil Technology - the designers of Boony:

"I wouldn't want to encourage people to tinker with it, and people can rest assured, he can't talk forever."

Yeah, well, nothing lasts forever. But change the batteries every once-in-a-while and you should be set for years to come.

An interesting point about the batteries - if you pull them out, then the Boony Counter will pause. Which means if Boony is getting you up at 5 in the morning then pull out the batteries for a few hours and get him working as your alarm clock.

But every 113.776 days is not often enough!
Then you need to stick around here in the upcoming weeks - because Tim has almost got the first bunch of Boony Mod Chips on the brew! All Boony - All the time!

Until then, I feel like playing Totem Tennis.