This will probably be my first and only DOS submission, as this is the only DOS game I ever played as a kid.

1999 hardware preset was selected due to faster load times. The submitted ROM was obtained by building an ISO image from Treasure-Cove_DOS_EN.zip with WinCDEmu.

You need to find the pufferfish in each level to advance to the next one. The fastest speedrun in theory would find the pufferfish hidden somewhere along the shortest path to each level's exit. However, I would estimate this probability at around 2 in 23 per level, or 1 in 1,521 for the whole loop. Since RNG for the entire loop is set after entering a new player name, we're gonna need a Lua script to iterate through all valid start frames and flag all candidates that have an optimal pufferfish location... only in the first level though, for simplicity. I manually checked levels 2 and 3 for all candidate frames. Interestingly, it took only until the 89th valid start frame to find one with all our pufferfish in optimal locations, meaning we either got very lucky or my probability calculation is very wrong!

The Lua script can be downloaded here

This TAS does not beat the game. Not only would you have to play through FORTY-FIVE freaking loops just to see the end screen, you'd also need to get the maximum score each time as the win condition is 200,000 points. But there was no way I was going to TAS all of that.