Mouser by Tony Young

[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.

Any idea how to contact the developer?

EDIT: Someone with a Facebook account moved the cheese within reach

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.

Thanks. Looks nice as a start toward something.

About the "placeholder music": You might be interested in Track 10.

B00daW also covered it as a video signal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjrFJbN5iCc

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...

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.


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.


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.


Who moved my cheese?


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.

I've actually got bleeding on the brain after watching that video.