Lord Tom

BTW, thanks so much to Thomas J for your disassembly! River Raid was (along with Pitfall II) one of the first games I played over and over as a kid, and getting to see how its source code works so many years later was a huge treat. I don't think I would have even attempted my simulator/bot project without the insights reading your comments provided.

Here's a complete movie I made (TAS using emulator/savestates, NOT realtime) of River Raid being beaten very quickly from start to finish; just under 83 minutes. https://youtu.be/GXEmPenZN0g

Thanks! It was only in the past several months that an atari 2600 emulator with the necessary features for making TAS's (BizHawk) became available. You may have noticed the tasvideos atari section has a "wishlist" thread, if you'd like to post suggestions: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13374 I was interested to read on this forum players reporting having actually beaten River Raid, and that it took about 3.5 hours. Based on the 100k TAS, a million point effort would be just over 80 minutes.

I made a "complete" map using some emulator scripting (600 sections should be enough to get to 1 million): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/28227674/TAS/River%20Raid/River%20Raid%20complete%20map.png Those who enjoy the game might also like this emulator-assisted speed-run (TAS) that gets to 100k as fast as possible: I'm currently writing a bot to get to 1 million. Will post if/when that effort is done.