In the Atari 2600 game: Escape from the Mindmaster from (1982) there are 6 levels of mazes of shapes, sometimes obstacles and enemies. The goal of all of these levels is to put all of the shapes into their corresponding holes and then reach the exit! but this TAS only completes the first of these levels.
In level 1 there are 4 shapes and 1 little green guy (he's not much of a threat). The positions of the shapes are dependent on RAM ADRESS 0x20 which is responsible for the RNG and there are 256 Different values for the RNG. Hence that means there are 256 different organizations for the positions of the shapes. In able to find the most optimal one I used this script (look through Pastebin if you would like to see the code) :
https://pastebin.com/RCExSZAh
how this script works.... First it uses its map table at line 128 to know where all the walls in the map are. Then with this info I made a function that finds the least amount of moves from one square to another. an basic explanation of the functionality of the function follows these steps:
1. It reads its start position input then it starts on that square
2. It goes straight until finding a wall in front of it
3. Every step it makes forward it checks for a wall to its left and right to see if it could have made a turn
4. If it finds a turn it marks it in its memory
5.after it cant go straight anymore it goes back to the possible turn(s) it could have made
6. cycle repeat until you find the least amount of steps
7. return least amount of steps
Great! So now that I had that I just read in memory the positions of every shape for every seed (0x20), Add it together to get the shortest path for that seed and the results are this:
https://pastebin.com/WaNnut07
I then looked through all of the seeds and found that the best seeds were: 97 and 129 and both of them tie at 29 moves and 24 rotations
so then I found the earliest occurrence of one of these seeds and found that seed 97 actually pops up within the first 10 frames...Just press the Reset button on that frame then made the TAS and now I'm submiting it.
Also you can find a RAM watch that I used In my user files #638805999540720822
Well I think that's about everything
Darkman425: Thanks to the author for
their post about the level generation RNG. It's odd to see a game generate floor layouts in pairs rather than either of the extremes of individual floors as needed or the full layout in one go. This does make an interesting case where the RNG needed for the fastest first level isn't necessarily the best RNG needed to get the fastest level 1 & 2 pair.From my read of the author's post, this seems to be the case so this does mean this would differ from a full game run.
Setting this to Playground since it's an Individual Level completion with, as far as I can tell, its own RNG seed for fastest completion compared to what a full game run would need.
