Submission #10299: Arcorann's PC Cow V: The Great Egg Quest in 00:01.498

Cow V: The Great Egg Quest is a text adventure for Windows 3.x, in which the player has to feed some chickens and collect some eggs. In this TAS I complete all of this as fast as possible.

It's shorter than Door (by keystroke count). Alternatively, it's as long as Door (by move count). Alternatively, it's longer than Door (by prompt count, or room count). One thing's for sure: it's easier than Door.

Besides, the manual talks about "high speed farm action"; as far as I'm concerned that's practically an invitation to TAS it.

We use BizHawk's new DOSBox core, with Windows 3.11 set up using the guide at Bizhawk/DOSBox, and leave the framerate as the default.

The game is run off an ISO containing the game files in the root directory, generated using the reproducible ISO bash script in WSL2. The game files may be found on the Internet Archive (the game is HippoWare: "if you use this program you must send $10 to a local zoo, specifying that the money should go towards the purchase of a new hippopotmus" (sic)).

The hashes of the game files are as follows:

The resulting files w311.hdd and WINCOW.iso are used in a bundle named wincow.xml.

The parser is custom; it only checks the first four characters when accepting commands, which lets us save a few keystrokes. There's help, north/south/east/west (can't shorten these to one letter, unfortunately), look, take, and so on. According to the in-game help you're supposed to specify what object to take, but that comes after the first four letters.

Scoring is as follows:

From the DOS prompt, we start the game by tab-completing CD W and WIN D:W (omitting the backslash). Running it in one command (tab-completing at C:\W, and C:\WINDOWS\WIN D:W) takes the same number of frames.

Since we've used WIN D:\WINCOW.EXE to start the game, we can buffer the entire run and end input while Windows loads the game, which is good because we have to wait for nearly 2 seconds for this to happen. Unfortunately, it still takes over 1 second before it loads to the point where inputs can be accepted; nevertheless, while inputting the run takes 16 frames in the DOSBox core (this is limited by the core processing keystrokes in its internal key order each frame), there are 14 frames between last input and where the game window first appears.

The game starts by asking for the player's name, so naturally we put "tas" (this loses no time). After that, the run's fairly self-explanatory. Obviously we need chicken feed to feed chickens, so we take them first. The game gives us the eggs automatically at the appropriate point without us having to take them, which is convenient.

There is one location we never visit: the woods. It has a cow in it.

Here is a comparison table of selected text adventures submitted to TASVideos:

There's still shorter out there, of course. Anyone want to try making a TAS of a one-move text adventure?

I do have a serious TAS of a proper game in the works. It's stalled a bit at the moment due to some troublesome manipulation, but once I'm less busy I'll get back to it.

And while I'm here, having seen trends in a certain encoder's encoding logos, I would like to briefly note that my favourite VTuber is Tsukino Mito. Just for reference.

DrD2k9: Claiming for judging.

DrD2k9: Updating movie file with a fixed input version.

DrD2k9: I generally like when runs end input early. For this particular submission, I find it amusing that the game is completed before the Windows startup sound effect is even completed itself. Obviously this is superhuman play and I can't claim anything is sub-optimal.

Accepting.

r3gamerz: Processing... Gotta encode fast!