The leaning tower of Aunt Lisa is in danger of collapsing. Little Max has to find the secret formula hidden in Uncle Pong's deserted house. Help Max recover the formula in time to save Aunt Lisa's tower.
At the very least, there are two versions of the original game, one released in 1995 and one in 1999. The latter added the ability to skip intro screens and animated screen transitions, in addition to a file select screen (we don't need it) and some changed audio files.
There is also a rather awkward 2015 Android version of the game...
Objectives
- Used emulator: Bizhawk 2.11 (DOSBox-X core)
- Genre: Educational, Adventure
- Collects numbers and launches a rocket!
-
About the Run
Recently, I've been digging up and researching old childhood games of mine from the Windows 3.1/9x era.
A few weeks ago, I played around and investigated this game, using the physical copy I had bought. The game didn't seem all that interesting from a speedrunning perspective. You could go to different rooms very quickly by using a button from the navbar at the bottom of the screen, but that's it.
Then I acquired another copy of the game and noticed that it would behave slightly different from what I saw when I played it on my copy, since there was now a file select screen, and I found out by chance that you could skip some screens by pressing Space, which greatly sped up the intro screens.
Normally when entering a new area, the narrator would start talking to comment on what's in the new area to discover. Normally he cannot be skipped but I discovered that you could click on things before he gets a chance to start talking, thus skipping him.
Bugs and Tricks
- Faster intro and transitions
- You can skip the intro screens by pressing Space, as well as speed up some animated screen transitions.
The first intro screen couldn't be skipped because it would result in a script error and the game would close.
- Skip the narrator aka. the "quickly clicking on something" bug
- When entering a new room, normally the narrator would comment on the new area you entered. There are different techniques to skip the narrator depending on the type of room.
Some rooms allow clicking on objects before the screen faded in and thus allow you to collect the number before the narrator is activated.
In other rooms where this doesn't work, you can click on the chest in your navbar to look at your collected numbers, which also skips the narrator. In the refrigerator and under the bed, I even managed to insta-close the chest by spamming the Left Mouse Key.
There is a side-effect to doing this trick, as it will glitch up the sprite of the Tivola logo in the bottom right corner, basicly functioning as a duplicate of one of the clickable sprites in the room. It also causes the navbar to close every few frames, but can be dealt with.
However, doing the bug in the Attic would cause the green button on the navbar to become unclickable because the duplicate sprite would be overlapping. I found that this could be avoided by going to the Attic as the very first room, which would cause a black box sprite to appear that didn't overlap with the button.
Doing the bug in the final room, the Inventor's room, would cause the button to fire the rocket to not appear, so I had to leave and come back to this room.
Verification Steps
1) Create w311.hdd
Use the steps outlined at this time of writing under the "Windows 3.11" tab here to create the HDD image containing Windows 3.11.
2) Find the game ISO
This run uses the game version released in 1999.
| File name | Size | MD5 hash |
|---|---|---|
| MaxFormula.ISO | 684,720 KB | ee a1 c3 d1 c3 4f a5 a0 c7 db 2c f3 88 12 e8 db |
I renamed the file as MaxForm.ISO.
3) Verification Movie
Load an XML file into Bizhawk with this content:
<BizHawk-XMLGame System="DOS" Name="Max Secret Formula verification file"> <LoadAssets> <Asset FileName=".\w311.hdd" /> <Asset FileName=".\MaxForm.iso" /> </LoadAssets> </BizHawk-XMLGame>
Then run this bk2 movie file and on frame, export as "MaxPlay.hdd".
What the verification movie does:
- Switch Display to S3 Trio64V 1.70.04 640x480 256
- Installs the game
4 TAS Movie
Load another XML file into Bizhawk with this content:
<BizHawk-XMLGame System="DOS" Name="Max and the Secret Formula"> <LoadAssets> <Asset FileName=".\MaxPlay.hdd" /> <Asset FileName=".\MaxForm.iso" /> </LoadAssets> </BizHawk-XMLGame>
Now, play one of these movies:
- Load the bk2 movie file from this submission, which ends input when clicking on the button to launch the rocket.
- Load this bk2 movie file which extends input to close the game and show the staff credits, rather than end the game on the screen with Pong's letter.
I verified the steps and there should be no ROM hash mismatch.
Note about extended input: Since I saw that extended input encodes are allowed, I'm requesting that this be done in this case as well.
Note about mouse cursor when movie ends: When the submitted bk2 movie ends, the user re-gains control over the mouse which will cause the mouse cursor to go to places unintended. I asked about this problem but didn't receive a reply with a solution in time. The linked video uses the extended input bk2 movie file, which keeps going until the very end of the linked video.
DrD2k9: Claiming for judging.
DrD2k9: Not much to comment on. The run seems optimal. Accepting.
despoa: Processing...