John Marrone, MultiCaps, and fine man has passed
 

My long-time friend, John Marrone, died last night.

He was a fine man and husband, as well as the programmer behind the Multi-Caps software.

He was a horse player, through and through. Right to the end he was playing the horses.

Rest in Peace.

My condolences Dave.

Dave:

Sincere condolences to you and the Marrone family. I am sincerely sorry for your loss. Rest In Peace Good Sir...

I'm very sorry for your loss, Dave. Condolences to you and the Marrone family.

Dave,

Sorry to hear of Johns passing. We only communicated through email a couple of times when he helped me with his Multicaps program, but he seemed like a good guy. It's been one of my favorites. Condolences to you and his family.

Sorry to hear that. He did good work. Was Multicaps the same as Procaps? I forget.

John and I go back a long ways,actually to the beginning of Multicaps, when he was developing it in his apartment on Reno in LV . He ran an ad in the Chicago version of the DRF and through that ad I made contact with him. The download for the files from his BB took about 45 minutes as I recall and for program updates he sent out CDs to all subscribers. He and George Decker along with Ron Tiller and Jim Cramer later shared a house just east of Sams Town on the east side of LV ,where they programmed and debated various aspects of horse racing . Tom Hambleton also spent a good bit of time there.
He later hooked up with Bris and programmed there for some 15 years or so. He also programmed for Ron Ambrose early in his career and later M Pizzola. After he left Bris he spent a few months with Tiller and Cramer in
developing some software using HTW files .

We played at the old Riveria on the strip generally with an occasional visit to other nearby race books. Decker almost always bested him using John's own program and caused John considerable frustration but it was pretty much all in good fun.

John only needed 4-5 hours of sleep and while at Bris he would deliver a paper route from 2-4 in the morning,go into work from 5am to 1pm,play golf in the afternoon and program on the newest version of MCaps in the evening.So, until he became quite ill, he fit a lot into his days.

The last time I talked with him,about a month ago, I asked him if he had talked to Dave S lately and he said no but he had a message to call him and would try when we hung up . I hope he made contact.

TD

Yes essentially . The speed rating and fractions were slightly different but the main program was very similar.

TD

I really enjoyed using Procaps. A big eye opener was the rankings. Even though they had been used in the original Sartin methodology, Procaps had more columns ranked. The RR was an eye opener, often the horse ranked 1st in RR won and paid a huge price. When bris had the other website I used to subscribe to it and it was instrumental in the development of my own pace handicapping theories.

I never actually knew the name of the man who did the work, great stuff. The layout was great, the sorting, really ahead of its time.

My condolences to his friends and family.

Very sorry to read this Dave. My sympathies go out to you and all who knew John.

I had used MC in the past and always considered it one of the better pieces of software to come along.

How old was John?

We were the same age: 67.

Sorry to hear Dave.
Condolences.

:rip:

I just found this when searching for something else on Google.

I made a lot of money off of Multicaps when it was a DOS program. I started in 1993, and Multicaps got shut down by BRIS a year or two later.

John got the last laugh on BRIS. Part of the settlement was that he turn over the rights for Multicaps to BRIS. He wrote it in an obscure programming language, and BRIS's programmers couldn't figure it out. They ended up hiring John, and he moved from Vegas to Lexington> I fell out of touch around 2000, but as far as I know, he worked for them for a long time after that, possibly until his passing.

John was way ahead of his time. The DOS program was, in my opinion, a lot better than the Windows version he created later. It had just about everything that could be asked for. The original had a small dedicated group of followers. Unfortunately, when BRIS commercialized it, a lot of the value disappeared.

I believe John was also the guy behind the PP Generator, which was another of the free software programs offered at BRIS.

Never tried MutiCaps, but the PP Gen completely changed my game for the better. It allowed me to put my own figures into the running lines (or below them) along with trip notes, race notes, horse notes etc etc.
Sadly, it has become outdated (was in Firefox I believe) and BRIS isn't offering anything new. My workload is immense without it.
I emailed them about a year ago inquiring about new programs, whether they be free or not, and they said nothing is in the works.

John even called me and spent about an hour on the phone with me to help install a patch when some of the fonts from the PP Gen became outdated.
One heck of a nice guy.

It was written in CLARION, my language of choice.

The NEWest MULTI-CAPS was written in WinDev, (my second language of choice).

John bequeathed me the source code to the NEW & unfinished MultiCaps.

Would love to find someone who could finish it for John's Widow.

I don't believe that is true because I do not have source for that.

He was, however, the resident expert on all that stuff.


Funny story about John & me.
PART 1
We first met in 1990 when I was stumping my first product in SoCal. I'd traveled from Reno and, 8 nights out of 11 I was doing in-home workshops in peoples homes.

John was a ThoroBrain user who made quite an impression.

I recall that during the meeting he attended, he was seated on a couch the entire time.

PART 2
Years later, when we became real friends via telephone & later Zoom, we had a conversation about that initial meeting.

I'd mentioned something about John's physical size.

My memory of him was that he was a big man. (He cast a large shadow, at least based off my initial impression.)

When I told him that, he laughed and asked me how tall I recall him being. When I said 6'3", he laughed even harder.

He was 5'4".

But he absolutely did cast a giant shadow.

PART 3
I had to fly to Las Vegas to see that for myself. LOL