Mouser by Tony Young

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tepples
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Mouser by Tony Young

Post by tepples »

[Original subject: Contact info for Tony Young, author of Mouser]

I was planning on rewriting Mouser by Tony Young (on the front page of nesdev.com) to work on an NES. I downloaded it and read the license info in the source code, and it required that I send him a copy of any modifications. But my test inquiry didn't go through. Within ten seconds after I clicked Send, I heard my tablet beep at me, announcing new mail. It was a bounce.
AOL's mail server wrote:550 5.1.1 <TYoung79@aol.com>: Recipient address rejected: aol.com
Any idea how to contact the developer?

EDIT: Someone with a Facebook account moved the cheese within reach
TYoung79
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Re: Contact info for Tony Young, author of Mouser

Post by TYoung79 »

Hi - I am Tony Young. I just registered for this forum. It's been many years since I have done much with NES development, but always thought I might try something again. I did that junkrom and mouser stuff when I was a teen, and before there was much of an NES homebrew scene.

I actually did some work on rewriting and updating the code for mouser back in 2012, but haven't shared any of that until now. I'd be glad to share the updates and I am fine with any modifications you would like to do to the original as well. See attached for what I did more recently, but feel free to keep going with your own modifications. I'm not sure what the spirit of my original work was, but at this point I'm glad that it may have helped some people get started and take the homebrew scene much farther since.

I stripped out the music code and simply used FamiTracker. The music I made was totally different and thrown together quickly as a placeholder. The code is much more organized and modularized, even if it is mostly macros. I'm a software engineer for a living, and was pretty embarassed to go back and look at what I did back in the day as far as code structure (or lack-thereof). I was just trying to hack together some proof that something could be done using pretty much only Yoshi and Marat Fayzullin's documents that were around in 1997.

I tested the output on my NES Powerpak (great work of engineering) that I bought around that time. I think it was the excitement of a product like that, that got me to take a look at the scene and revisit that horrible code I wrote back in the day.
Attachments
MOUSER.zip
Drastic Update / Re-write of Mouser, 16 years later.
(21.38 KiB) Downloaded 541 times
tepples
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Re: Mouser by Tony Young

Post by tepples »

Thanks. Looks nice as a start toward something.

About the "placeholder music": You might be interested in Track 10.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Mouser by Tony Young

Post by rainwarrior »

B00daW also covered it as a video signal:
Image
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjrFJbN5iCc
TYoung79
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Re: Mouser by Tony Young

Post by TYoung79 »

Awesome cover, tepples. I literally sat there with a keyboard, realizing I would be manually hard coding each note, so I wanted a very simple repetitive riff that was no more than a couple measures. That would be cool to stick Track 10 of your NSF in there instead of my rookie FamiTracker song ;-)

It's pretty cool seeing that the NES hacking I did so long ago still has some interest...
tepples
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Re: Mouser by Tony Young

Post by tepples »

feel free to keep going with your own modifications.
Thank you, and welcome back to NESdev.

So essentially, the gameplay is similar to Nibbles.bas and its NES port NeSnake 2, except there's no tail to run into. It worked great on my PowerPak.
That would be cool to stick Track 10 of your NSF in there instead of my rookie FamiTracker song
I'm thinking both, once it's expanded past 2 levels. We could use your new FT song for the first and my cover for a later level.
It's pretty cool seeing that the NES hacking I did so long ago still has some interest...
Well it is the homebrew that started homebrew.

I took a look at the source code, and the macro-heavy style differed from what I'm used to reading, but I might pick some things up.

Code: Select all

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; RELOCATE CHEESE ROUTINE
Who moved my cheese? :P

Code: Select all

				.db 248, 248 ; offscreen (unreachable)
I think it's time to find a new Cheese Station.

This sort of ties into the direction I was considering taking in a sequel:

Some human scientists are doing an experiment similar to Rat Park. They've built rodent habitats and populated them with mice, rats, and the descendants of some 15 cm tall people who stowed away on a ship that had visited a pair of islands off the coast of Australia. Linking these habitats are mazes full of twisty little passages for the critters to make their dens. Occasionally, the scientists refill the food in one habitat. When this food runs out, the rodents quickly make their way through the maze to find new cheese and establish a new den. But as J. M. Barrie pointed out in Peter Pan, people of that size can't hold more than one feeling at a time, so they tend to sit in place and pout "Who moved my cheese?" until near starvation.
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Re: Mouser by Tony Young

Post by WedNESday »

rainwarrior wrote:B00daW also covered it as a video signal:
Image
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjrFJbN5iCc
I've actually got bleeding on the brain after watching that video.
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