Mixed-Up Mother Goose is a Sierra adventure game, in the lineage of classics like King's Quest and Space Quest. It is designed for small children, with simplified mechanics and no reading requirement. The game was remade multiple times; this TAS is of the original AGI version from 1987.
The run features computer-optimized routing, careful micro optimization, and a few fun movement glitches. The most significant aspect is exhaustive enumeration of random seeds to find an item assignment that can be solved quickly. These submission comments highlight the most interesting parts; for chronological development notes see thread #23454.
Suggested screenshot: frame 19277

Emulation

Mixed-Up Mother Goose (1987) 1.00D, AGI version 2.915
goodolddays.net ID: 168
SHA-256 checksum:
e33dea30ceb5692d4111f3a92037cbd15b9c62f2dd2ea2a251ee1ce3e5e354fc  000168_mixed-up_mother_goose/disk1.img
PCem 17+st-1
libTAS 1.4.3
Debian bullseye amd64, Linux 5.10.0-13-amd64
Music is an important part of this game, which is why I chose to play it on an emulated Tandy 1000 rather than one of the premade PC configurations. Mixed-Up Mother Goose uses the Tandy's multi-channel sound hardware for better music than is possible with the PC speaker.

PCem

Machine: [8086] Tandy 1000 SL/2
CPU: 8086/8
Memory: 512 KB
HDD: None
FDD1: 3.5" 720k
FDD2: None
PCem ROMs and SHA-256 checksums:
37527f661580e5a09710051cec67422abfadf31c61b841537a91e7f27be19304  mda.rom
2143765cebd59c2ef024f56284e17259b2dfaa8fca6cf419f48d533c5f3c55af  wy700.rom
f17b4f9c063f88a096b02681b203178705796f0abcdffc696f2a1d605e3af84d  8x12.bin
7fe228566de37a2f06ca6703a9f1280fd75db2f2d0e0e635b7c3b1e214680866  tandy1000sl2/8079047.hu1
160116f3ad6788af7faa7a5f12de636de58ea18e2021ddba242ac1e801a927af  tandy1000sl2/8079048.hu2

Game mechanics

The object of the game is to complete nursery rhymes by finding 20 items that have been randomly scattered over the game map and delivering each to its proper place. After completing a rhyme, you are rewarded with a musical cutscene.
The 20 items are internally numbered from 11 to 30. They are divided into two types: "walking" items and "pocket" items. The walking items have an animated sprite that follows you around the screen. The pocket items, when collected, simply disappear from the screen and are understood to be carried by the player.
#ItemTypeDelivery roomNursery rhyme
11Wifewalking12Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater
12Miss Muffetwalking9Little Miss Muffet
13Mousewalking41Hickory Dickory Dock
14Fiddlers Threewalking37Old King Cole
15Sheepwalking23Little Bo-Peep
16Little Dogwalking27Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?
17Little Lambwalking13Mary Had a Little Lamb
18Fiddlepocket7Hey Diddle Diddle
19Piepocket43Little Jack Horner
20Knifepocket3Little Tommy Tucker
21Steakpocket36Jack Sprat
22Pipepocket37Old King Cole
23Bowlpocket37Old King Cole
24Brothpocket21There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe
25Candlestickpocket33Jack Be Nimble
26Pailpocket1Jack and Jill
27Watering Canpocket31Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
28Sixpencepocket15There Was a Crooked Man
29Ladderpocket5Humpty Dumpty
30Horsepocket18Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross
The map consists of 44 rooms. Rooms 1–35 are "overworld" rooms arranged in a 7×5 grid. Rooms 36–44 are "interior" rooms, accessed via doors in the overworld. There are barriers (shown as black lines in the graphic below) that prevent you from walking between or within certain rooms. Gold squares show where where items may be placed; blue circles are the rooms they must be delivered to. For example: item 12, Miss Muffet, wherever she may be placed initially, must be delivered to her tuffet in room 9 (blue circle marked 12). There are 22 rooms eligible for item placement and only 20 items to place, so 2 of the gold squares will be unused in any item assignment. Item 27, the Watering Can, is the only item whose location is not randomized. It always starts in room 34.
Game map, a grid of 7×5 overworld rooms where rooms 4, 10, 12, 13, 15, 21, 24, 26, and 32 additionally link to an interior room. Black lines show where there are barriers between or within adjacent rooms.
The map shown is roughly the one used for computer-assisted routing and random seed optimization. It simplifies and omits some details that are important for small-scale optimization and point-to-point movement between route waypoints. For example, at 19:08 we will comment on a wall-hugging strategy that gives faster vertical movement between rooms. The one-way passage from room 24 to room 17 is a movement glitch we will see exploited at 11:08.
The player's inventory can hold only one item at a time. When holding an item, there are only two ways to remove it from the inventory: deliver it to its destination, or swap it with a different item. This is where the distinction between walking items and pocket items comes into play. The rule is: walking items cannot remain in an interior room. If you try to swap a walking item in an interior room, the walking item will not stay in the room, but will instead "warp" to some other overworld room. The route used in this TAS uses one swap, but the warp mechanic turns out not to save time.
There are 20 items, but only 18 nursery rhymes. That is because Old King Cole demands not one, but three items: Pipe, Bowl, and Fiddlers Three, which must be delivered in exactly that order. Apart from that restriction, any item may be delivered at any time. The open-world nature of the game, and the possibility of item swaps and warps, makes optimizing a specific random item assignment nontrivial.

Time-based random seed manipulation

The single most important optimization is setting the system clock immediately after boot. This is to control the RNG seed and get a favorable item assignment. The Tandy 1000 does not have a hardware real-time clock, so setting the time in libTAS has no effect. Instead, we run the TIME command at the DOS prompt.
DOS prompt showing the command "A>time 3:40:5.3".
The item assignment algorithm is based on a random number generator that is seeded by the time of day, specifically a 16-bit counter that increments at 18.2 Hz. There are 65,536 possible random seeds, but only 24,110 distinct item assignments: many seeds result in the same effective assignment. (I ignored 131 seeds that cause the RNG to re-seed itself from the current time again before item assignment is finished, and that therefore produce different assignments depending on the CPU speed.)
I wrote an optimizer to test every one of the 24,110 possible item assignments and find the one with the fastest route. The optimizer knows about distances and inter-room connectivity, but it ignores some fixed costs, like delivery cutscenes, and makes a few approximations. The game's state space is too large to search exhaustively, so the optimizer is an approximate one, based on simulated annealing. Running the optimizer on all item assignments took about 1,800 CPU-hours. One assignment emerged as the best by a wide margin. There are three seeds that result in it: 34871, 44046, and 52929.
Histogram of route costs according to the optimizer, with the bin corresponding to seeds 34871, 44046, and 52929 highlighted as the minimum.
The difference in estimated time between the worst and best item assignments is large, over 5 minutes. Because the 16-bit 18.2 Hz counter wraps about once per hour, and there are three usable seeds, there are 72 moments in each 24-hour day that we might use. The time specification "3:40:5.3" was chosen because it fits in the BIOS keyboard buffer. The timestamp we're actually aiming for is 3:40:18.02, which is when we start a new game and item assignment happens.
The item assignment we get is shown below. The arrows are just a visual guide to help associate items' locations with their delivery rooms, and do not necessarily reflect movement in the run.
Game map, with item assignment of seeds 34871, 44046, and 52929 shown. A faint arrow connects each item location to its destination room. Item locations are as in the route table below.
The route optimizer outputs the plan below. (Actually, the optimizer outputs 24 routes that it thinks are equivalent, because of its connectivity and movement approximations. I arrived at this one, out of the 24, after analyzing small differences between the different options.)
RoomActionsTimestamp in this run
start in room 32 (Mother Goose's house exterior) 02:00
go to room 30get Little Dog02:20
go to room 27deliver Little Dog to boy03:02
go to room 28get Broth03:41
go to room 21 (shoe house exterior)deliver Broth to old woman03:50
go to room 44 (shoe house interior)get Candlestick04:44
go to room 33deliver Candlestick to Jack05:20
go to room 34get Watering Can05:51
go to room 31deliver Watering Can to Mary Quite Contrary06:24
go to room 29get Bowl07:27
go to room 37 (castle interior)swap Bowl for Ladder08:24
go to room 5 (castle courtyard east)deliver Ladder to Humpty Dumpty08:42
go to room 11get Pipe09:13
go to room 37 (castle interior)deliver Pipe to Old King Cole, get Bowl, deliver Bowl09:30
go to room 19 (Horner house side yard)get Mouse10:36
go to room 41 (clock house interior)deliver Mouse, get Steak11:06
go to room 36 (Sprat house interior)deliver Steak to Sprats, get Pie12:03
go to room 43 (Horner house interior)deliver Pie to Jack Horner, get Sixpence13:09
go to room 15 (crooked house exterior)deliver Sixpence to Crooked Man14:26
go to room 40 (crooked house interior)get Horse15:09
go to room 18 (Banbury Cross)deliver Horse15:44
go to room 16get Sheep16:38
go to room 23deliver Sheep to Little Bo-Peep16:44
go to room 22get Pail17:20
go to room 1 (well)deliver Pail to Jack and Jill17:47
go to room 8get Miss Muffet18:19
go to room 9deliver Miss Muffet18:33
go to room 2get Knife19:13
go to room 3 (castle courtyard west)deliver Knife to Tommy Tucker19:53
go to room 20get Little Lamb21:01
go to room 13 (school exterior)deliver Little Lamb to Mary21:10
go to room 39get Fiddle21:58
go to room 7deliver Fiddle to cat22:16
go to room 14get Wife22:58
go to room 12 (pumpkin house exterior)deliver Wife to Peter Pumpkin Eater23:33
go to room 6get Fiddlers Three24:18
go to room 37 (castle interior)deliver Fiddlers Three to Old King Cole25:17

Floppy drive delay

The game runs directly from the A: floppy drive. A hard disk drive was an optional upgrade for the Tandy SL/2, and even on other PC-compatibles, directly from floppy is how many would have played back in the day. The floppy drive adds another dimension to optimization, namely the time needed to read data. When you enter a new room, deliver an item, or collect certain items, there is a delay while the game reads data from the drive. It's obviously a good idea to minimize the number of floppy drive accesses, but it's even a little more complicated than that. The disk drive motor needs to spin up before you can read data, which takes about 1.2 seconds. The OS keeps the motor spinning ("hot") for about 1.5 seconds after the drive is used. If you do another access while the drive is still hot, you avoid the cost of spinning it up. But if too much time passes, you must pay the spin-up cost again at the next disk access.
So, while you want to access the drive as little as possible, when you do need to access it, you want to batch as many consecutive accesses together as possible, in order to amortize the drive motor delay. In most cases, the most accesses we can string together is 1 or 2, but sometimes we manage 3 or 4.

00:15 Name entry

A one-character name is quickest to enter. The traditional TAS name "A" doesn't work, because the AGI text parser treats the word "a" specially. For the same reason, the name "I" doesn't work (and actually softlocks). I used the name "@" in honor of the classic roguelike protagonist.

02:00 Game speed

Screenshot showing "Fast" being selected from the "Speed" menu.
For this TAS, I decided to break with tradition and play the game on "Fast" speed rather than "Fastest". On Fastest, the game's speed depends on the speed of the emulated CPU. On Fast, the game runs at a fixed rate of 20 cycles per second.
The player character can move 1 pixel per game cycle (horizontally or vertically or both). It may look like the player moves 2 pixels per cycle horizontally, but that is because the game's graphics are stretched 2× horizontally—internally, the x-coordinate only changes by 1 unit. Therefore it takes 1 second to move 20 pixels. If you need to move both horizontally and vertically, the time needed is proportional to the maximum of the horizontal and vertical distances (Chebyshev distance); i.e., diagonal movement is free. The walkable area of rooms is usually 160 pixels wide and 80 pixels tall, but there are many exceptions.

02:00 Shortcut behind Mother Goose's house

We start in room 32, at the bottom center of the map. The route calls for moving left, into room 31. Instead of walking immediately left, we first walk up, to the back of the house, then left.
AGI adventure games are programmed in a bytecode called logic. The connections between rooms are not represented in any systematic or structured way, but as snippets of logic code in each room. This is one of many places where custom, room-specific logic alters room connectivity in a way that is not visually apparent. This is the relevant logic in room 32:
get.posn(O_EGO, v212, v213);
if (v212 < 62 && v213 < 95) {
  new.room(31);
}
It says: if the player's y-coordinate is less than (closer to the top of the screen than) 95, and their x-coordinate is less than 62, then immediately move into room 31. It means that the threshold for entering room 31, when you're behind the house, is x-coordinate 62, which is faster to get to than walking to x-coordinate 0 from the front of the house. Visually, it looks like this:
Picture of room 32 with zones that transfer to other rooms highlighted.
(The game internally locates the player by the bottom left pixel of their sprite, but in connectivity graphics like this one I have adjusted the visual zones to be relative to the bottom center of the sprite. The player sprite is 7 pixels wide.)
Nearly every room has custom logic like this that controls movement to neighboring rooms. There is no way to infer the rules from the graphics; in every room you have to read the logic and check for exceptions. We will use this shortcut behind the house again, in the reverse direction, when we return with the Little Dog—only then, it will be defined in the logic of room 31. A shortcut in one direction does not automatically imply a shortcut in the opposite direction.

02:42 Little Dog delivery

The first item we collect and deliver is the Little Dog. We must take the dog from room 30 to room 27, which means moving 4 rooms east and 1 room north. Here is one of the places where we batch floppy drive accesses. We go north from room 32 to room 25 near the right edge of the screen, so that we can then go east from room 25 to room 26 while the floppy drive is still hot. This "corner cutting" technique will be used repeatedly. I tested every corners on the path between room 30 and room 27, and this one was the fastest.

04:39 Out-of-bounds Candlestick

We collect the Broth from room 28 and deliver it to the old woman who lives in a shoe, one room to the north. Inside the shoe is the next item, the Candlestick.
Animated gameplay capture showing the player walking out of bounds in room 44 to collect the Candlestick.
Although it's not visually obvious, the player takes a shortcut out of bounds in the shoe house. The trick takes advantage of an oversight in this room's priority screen, the hidden layer of graphics that defines where the player is allowed to walk, among other things. This is what the room's priority screen looks like, with the relevant part magnified:
The priority of room 44, with a 4× zoom near the door showing that a black line does not reach the bottom row of pixels.
The blue and black lines define the walkable area: the player may not cross these lines. The area by the door is marked with a green line (a signal line) as if it were a door, but the logic of the room does not actually treat it as a door. Instead, the green pixels are inert, walkable pixels, which form a 1-pixel gap at the bottom of the screen that leads outside the intended walkable area. Though out of bounds, we can still get close enough to be within the Candlestick's collection radius. Being out of bounds saves time in exiting the room, because we can walk straight down rather than having to walk all the way back to the door.

05:19 Candlestick delivery

We enter room 33, to deliver the Candlestick, from the north, because entering from the north provides us with about 43 pixels of free horizontal movement. To avoid the player being hidden by foreground objects, like trees, room logic sometimes forces the player's position to certain values. On entering room 33 from the north, if the player's x-coordinate is greater than 130 (i.e., behind the tree), it gets set to 110 instead. (Something similar would happen near the left edge of the screen.)
get.posn(O_EGO, v212, v213);
if (prev_room_no == 26) {
  if (v212 > 130) {
    position(O_EGO, 110, 86);
  } else {
    if (v212 > 80) {
      position(O_EGO, 80, 86);
    }
  }
}
The delivery of the Candlestick, like most deliveries in this game, is based on distance from a point. Delivery is triggered when the player is within 19 pixels of Jack. Distance in AGI is defined as the sum of horizontal distance and vertical displacement (Manhattan distance). Therefore the delivery radius defines a diamond-shaped area:
Picture of room 33 with the delivery zone highlighted.
But the goal is not simply to get inside the delivery area as fast as possible. The player is usually scripted to move to fixed waypoints after initiating the delivery, and during cutscenes, the player moves at half speed. It is usually best to move the player to the point in the delivery area that is closest to the first waypoint. In the graphic above, the first waypoint is marked by a black dot. In this room, the player walks down and right, in order to get close to the waypoint before starting the delivery.
The delivery cutscene must be loaded from disk. Here, we were able to start the delivery with the floppy drive still hot from entering the room.

07:27 Bowl, Ladder, and Pipe

After collecting and delivering the Watering Can, the route has us collect the Bowl in room 29 and move it to Old King Cole's castle (room 37). We cannot actually deliver the Bowl yet, because Old King Cole will demand his Pipe first. What we can do is take the Bowl to the castle now and swap it with the Ladder there.
The Ladder needs to go to Humpty Dumpty, who is two rooms away in room 5. Exiting room 5 to the south causes diagonal movement to room 11, where the Pipe is.
We take the Pipe to the castle and deliver it to Old King Cole, then immediately deliver the Bowl that we stashed there earlier. The king now asks for his Fiddlers Three, which will be our last delivery.

11:36 Clock house shortcut

After visiting the castle, we begin a circuit through the houses in town. The first stop is room 19, Jack Horner's side yard, where we collect the Mouse. We take the Mouse across the street and deliver it at the clock house, room 41.
In the clock house we collect the Steak, whose destination is room 36, to the north. Because there is a hedge dividing room 17 horizontally, if we were to obey the intended map connectivity, we would have to go east to the main road (room 25), then northwest to room 17, then north to rooms 10 and 36. Instead, we use a connectivity glitch to shortcut directly to the other side of the hedge in room 17.
Picture of room 24 with zones that transfer to other rooms highlighted.
It is intended that the player be able to walk around the back of the house to arrive at the side yard, inside the hedge in room 17. The logic of room 24 defines a special connectivity zone that juts down from the horizon, behind the house, to make this transition easier. The logic in room 17 decides where to place the player based on their x-coordinate: if the player is sufficiently far to the left, it assumes the player must have come from outside the town wall; otherwise it places the player inside the yard. But the logic in room 17 is slightly out of sync with the dimensions of the special connectivity zone in room 24. There is a 1-pixel-wide strip inside the wall in room 24 that is far enough to the left to be considered outside the wall in room 17. This shortcut not only avoids having to enter room 25, it also puts the player closer to the gate in room 17.

17:36 Miss Muffet dodge

The next few deliveries are straightforward. We deliver the Steak to the Sprats and the Pie to Jack Horner, then make a round trip to the Crooked Man's house to deliver the Sixpence and bring back the Horse. Then we go to room 22 to collect the Pail. In taking the Pail north, we benefit from having already delivered the Sixpence. If we had not, a short cutscene would play as we passed by the Crooked Man outside his house.
Animated gameplay capture showing the player narrowly avoiding the item collection radius of Miss Muffet in room 8.
In room 8 we narrowly avoid getting too close to Miss Muffet, which would trigger an undesired item swap and a cutscene. The dodge is just barely possible. The zigzag movement to avoid Miss Muffet and the tree does not lose any time, because in this room and the next we are bottlenecked on vertical movement, not horizontal.

19:08 Knife delivery

After delivering the Pail to Jack and Jill, we return to Miss Muffet and take her to her tuffet, one room away.
The next step in the route is to get the Knife from room 2 and take it to Tommy Tucker in room 3. Although the rooms are adjacent, there is a wall between them. It looks like a long walk around the wall and into town, and it is, but we speed it up by batching four consecutive floppy drive accesses and taking advantage of some unintuitive room connectivity.
Animated composite of the player walking from room 9 to room 2, collecting the Knife and returning to room 9, clipping the corner of room 10, and then entering room 17.
After delivering Miss Muffet in room 9, we walk north to room 2 to collect the Knife, then return south to room 9. While we have to spin up the floppy drive to cross from room 9 to room 2, the Knife is close enough to the bottom of room 2 that we can dip in and out while the drive is still hot.
If we were to follow the game map graphic, from room 9 we would next walk one room south to room 16, then one room east to room 17. That would require traversing the whole of room 9 vertically, which is not only slow in itself (about 4 seconds), but would let the floppy drive spin down. Instead, we go east to room 10, where there is a little triangle of walkable area outside the wall. The connectivity from this little region of the map is not intuitive. If the player's y-coordinate is higher on the screen than row 113, touching the left edge of the screen takes you west, as you might expect. But if you are lower than that threshold, touching the left edge of the screen takes you south, to room 17:
if (ego_edge_code == 4) { // left edge of screen
  get.posn(O_EGO, v212, v213);
  if (v213 > 112) {
    new.room(17);
  } else {
    new.room(9);
  }
}
Besides batching floppy drive accesses, this technique saves vertical movement. The player is hardcoded to enter room 10 at y-coordinate 105. Going south from room 10 therefore only requires walking down 8 pixels, rather than all the way to the bottom edge as would be required in room 9.
When we finally deliver the Knife to Tommy Tucker in room 3, see how we walk to the left side before entering the delivery area. This is for the same reason that we delayed delivering the Candlestick to Jack: the delivery cutscene automatically moves the player to a waypoint towards the left, and the player moves at half speed during cutscenes.

23:29 Pumpkin house shortcut

The last four items are in the northeast part of the map. Mary's lost Little Lamb is one room south of where it needs to be; and then inside the schoolhouse is the Fiddle that needs to be delivered to the cat in room 7.
In taking Peter Pumpkin Eater's Wife back to her house, we take advantage of a connectivity glitch similar to the one we used at the clock house. The intended way of entering the yard of room 12 is to walk through the front gate from room 19. But in another instance of room logic not exactly agreeing with the walkable area of rooms, we can "jump the wall" from the right side of room 19. We walk south from room 12 to room 19 along the east wall, then immediately return to room 12 by walking north, far enough to the left that the logic of room 12 places the player inside the yard.
Picture of room 19 with zones that transfer to other rooms highlighted.
The shortcut is not symmetric: there is no reciprocal direct connection from inside the yard in room 12 to outside the wall in room 19.

25:17 Final delivery

We return to the northeast portion of the map to collect the Fiddlers Three, again hugging the wall for faster vertical movement.
After the delivery cutscene plays, we have to press a key to dismiss the text. After that, the ending cutscene plays out by itself.

Frame counts by category

Like Ocarina of Time, the speedrun of this game consists more of cutscenes than gameplay.
CategoryFramesMinutesPercentage
Boot and DOS prompt1750:020.1%
Menuing870:010.0%
Gameplay425587:0627.4%
Cutscenes6547910:5542.2%
Floppy drive motor delay102301:426.6%
Floppy drive data access181093:0111.7%
Room loading180863:0111.7%
Doors opening/closing4580:050.3%

Utilities

git clone https://www.bamsoftware.com/git/mumg.git
The tools and notes I made in the course of creating this TAS are available in the Git repository above. They include:
  • A reimplementation of the game's random assignment algorithm
  • Extracted picture and priority graphics
  • Decompiled and lightly annotated logic resources
  • The simulated annealing–based route optimizer
  • A watch file with useful RAM addresses
Screenshot of PCem in room 27, just before delivering the Little Dog. RAM watch values are overlaid: ego_x: 0, ego_y: 164, room_no: 27, new_room: 0, inv: 0, inv_x: 0, inv_y: 162, item_dist: 139, item_radius: 167, f117: c, floppy status: 1, floppy timer: 36.

Thanks

  • agikit by Nat Budin, which was indispensable for its ability to decompile AGI logic resources.
  • AGI Programmers' Wiki, with references for logic commands and file formats.
  • ScummVM, from which I ripped the AGI picture resource renderer to make the game map and visualize obstacles in rooms. I tried some other renderers but ScummVM's was the only one accurate enough to draw all the rooms correctly.
  • agi-upscale and its associated video, which is what got me interested in AGI.

slamo: Replaced movie file to fix the platform, and judging!
slamo: Tremendously well-researched and planned as always. Great work.
This run uses a configuration besides our three pre-made setups, which we allow as long as there are instructions on how to reproduce it. In this case, the Tandy is very easy to set up, having DOS built into the ROM, so only a .cfg file is required. The justification for this config is that the built-in sound is much better, which I think is a perfectly valid reason to use it. We were also able to sync the run, so all the information here is adequate.
The only other thing to talk about is the game speed. There are faster runs out there, but they 1) use DOSBox, which is not exactly the paragon of accuracy, and 2) rely on a high cycle count and the Fastest speed setting, which is only limited by the CPU speed, and we explicitly disallow using unintended environments to make the gameplay faster. Fastest speed actually would have been fine in this case, since you're playing the game on intended hardware, but I'm not going to sweat the game speed too much, especially if you have ambitions to console-verify this. As long as the gameplay is optimized (which it is), then we're copacetic.
Accepting!
fsvgm777: Processing.


TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 15628
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7943: Sand's DOS Mixed-Up Mother Goose in 25:51.83
Reviewer, Expert player (2438)
Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 414
I'm unable to sync this, can you please post the contents of your cfg file? I also suspect it may have something to do with ~/.pcem/nvr/tandy.tandy1000sl2.bin - this is the contents of the Tandy's EEPROM that contains personal BIOS settings. I don't think it would be a bad idea to share that either, since the NVR can cause desyncs on other systems as well.
Sand
He/Him
Player (143)
Joined: 6/26/2018
Posts: 175
slamo wrote:
I'm unable to sync this, can you please post the contents of your cfg file?
Sure, it's here: https://www.bamsoftware.com/computers/tasvideos/mumg-tandy.cfg. You will have to replace /path/to/000168_mixed-up_mother_goose/disk1.img. ~/.pcem/nvr/tandy.tandy1000sl2.bin is just 128 bytes of 0x00. 512 KB of RAM is important—it doesn't sync with 640 KB. In the "Game executable" field of libTAS I have /usr/bin/pcem, and in the "Command-line options" field I have --config /home/user/.pcem/configs/tandy.cfg --load_drive_a /path/to/000168_mixed-up_mother_goose/disk1.img (see annotations).
Reviewer, Expert player (2438)
Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 414
Thanks, I'm getting it to sync now. It was indeed the .bin file, it doesn't initialize with all 0x00 for me for some reason.
Post subject: Platform: DOS
Sand
He/Him
Player (143)
Joined: 6/26/2018
Posts: 175
The system is showing as Linux, but it should be DOS. I noticed after submitting that there's a way to control the system from the LTM file: add a line with Platform: DOS to annotations.txt: https://github.com/TASVideos/tasvideos/blob/c981736dc4b705e273b5e323d6e617431ca0f0ec/TASVideos.Parsers/Parsers/Ltm.cs#L99 User movie #638091565403343303 is the same as the submitted movie, but with Platform: DOS added to annotations.txt.
fsvgm777
She/Her
Senior Publisher, Player (226)
Joined: 5/28/2009
Posts: 1215
Location: Luxembourg
I got it to sync as well, and I did not have to initialise the .bin file with all zeroes beforehand.
Steam Community page - Bluesky profile Oh, I'm just a concerned observer.
Reviewer, Expert player (2438)
Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 414
Just as an addendum to my sync issue, the reason my desync was happening is that my PCem was pulling the default NVR file from ~/.pcem/nvr/default/. Normally this folder wouldn't ever be there, but I must have manually put it there at some point during the PCem testing process. This folder is not present in the PCem-st build but is there if you download the regular PCem v17 Linux source code, and the default NVR file is indeed not zeroed out. If I remove tandy1000sl2.bin from this folder then the movie syncs with no issues. Also, I like this Tandy config so much that we might officially adopt it.
Editor, Expert player (2080)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3284
I watched this on 2x speed and using the world map you provided as a guide. Although I would normally not think much of this TAS, it's impressive how much work you put into making this TAS (6 months of work apparently?). Also I never knew that the Sierra game which needed so much routing would be this one. I thought that it would have been something like Quest for Glory. (Though I knew nothing about Mixed-Up Mother Goose before your forum post.)
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 15628
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [5088] DOS Mixed-Up Mother Goose by Sand in 25:51.83