I’m helping a friend with his Mousin’ this weekend and both of us noticed that the behind the playfield ramp (referred to in the manual as the ‘Transfer Tray’) seems to have a purpose that was never coded for the game. There’s a series of 4 micro switches and a small solenoid kicker. If anyone is curious about what it looks like it is on page 2-24 of the manual.
The only thing we can come up with is that it is used to find ball stuck state if in the unlikely scenario you drop all 3 balls into the mouse hole shot. However! On the switch matrix they’re referred to as Mouse Hole Lock 1 / 2 /3 (switches 59-61). It almost suggests that there was plans for a second multiball based on the mouse hole that may have been stripped from the game code before shipping.
Well it is more of a tray in reality. It feeds the ball from the mouse hole shot (Jackpot / Cheese / Million shot) to the right return which drops into the right in-lane shot (Mouse trap / 2x scoring shot).
It was just surprising to see the 3 switches named “locks” when in normal gameplay it just transfers the ball from one side of the playfield to the other; thus my question about if there was something planned and scrapped / turned into something to detect stuck balls. And since we have folks on the forum that were in the scene when Mousin first came around maybe someone would know
It is physically in the game. We both were expecting some sort of wire form or ramp so it was a bit of surprise to see what was actually back there. Then we double checked the manual to make sure we weren’t seeing some kind of crazy mod or something.
Hah! @noahpdavis mentioned to me earlier that it might be a job for someone with a p-roc to add in a jackpot multiplier based on those locks. Something like a first ball in and you have 5-10 second timer to drop the ball 2 / 3 in for double / triple jackpots. With that said it would seriously bloat the jackpots in the game even more so
Makes you wonder if castle multi in BSD was inspired by it since Oursler was working at Williams at that time.
My guess is that was the original plan for multiball, with the mouse traps for something else? It would be a pretty cool multiball start to release 3 balls from the back.
Whatever the original intention was, if the parts are still in the game, the functionality must have been removed or left out of software development after production was well underway. I can’t imagine Williams would have spent the few bucks for parts if they didn’t need to. I’ll have to take a look in the back of mine and see if it’s there. I bought my Mousin’ totally disassembled but I don’t think I ever looked behind the back panel when I was putting it back together.
The parts are there in the Mousin’ I op as one of the switches needed repair at some point because jackpots weren’t scoring 100% of the time the shot was hit.
