Submission #9442: Walgrey & Deppy's A2600 Maze Craze: A Game of Cops 'n Robbers in 00:05.39

Warning: This run contains flashing lights.

This has been sitting in my user files for a while now. Figured I would submit it. Worst that can happen is that it gets rejected, right?

Maze Craze is a simple two-player Atari game. In this game, you have to find the exit in a randomly generated maze. This game has a boatload of customizable options, including adding enemies, changing the maze's visibility, or even placing fake walls. It's worth mentioning that you can increase the player's speed, but this takes way too long to do, so it's not done here.

When powering on the game, the game randomly chooses between 16 starting seeds. By adding power inputs during the first few frames of the run, we can choose our starting seed. After this, the seed is updated every frame. When we reset, the game uses that seed to generate a new maze. The objective of this TAS is to generate the shortest possible maze in the fewest amount of frames.

The program Deppy used searched for the top 100 shortest mazes and how long it takes to reach them from each possible starting seed. We believe that this is the fastest one. The source code for this program is available here.

The improvement for this submission can be found here. I switched to BizHawk 2.10 with the Stella core because it emulates the loading more accurately. In past TASes, I was able to press reset while the game was generating a maze, which simply isn't possible on actual hardware.

Out of the 65 536 possible mazes that can be generated, only 2 of them have the minimal possible length of 19 steps. These unfortunately take a long time to generate. You could potentially do more resets to generate these mazes faster, but at that point, they're not viable. Doing more than one reset is too slow. If you do want to see this however, I made another movie for fun that you can see here.

It's also worth mentioning that this TAS is slower than RTA runs. In RTA runs, people can just reset until they generate a viable maze, since time starts on first input instead.

I would like to give a really big special thanks to Deppy. Without her work reverse-engineering the game, this TAS would not have been possible.

Much love,
Walgrey

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Ok, I see that the new files are not getting us anywhere. This situation is weird, because to get the ultimate pattern, you would have to reset to until you get what you want. Because we don't know how long the speed runners perform these resets, this run will suffice. TAS timing starts at power on, but the RTA runs don't. The actual IGT gameplay, may be longer than the human effort...but the overall effort certainly is going to beat a human. I'm just disappointed that desired patterned couldn't be achieved. I'm turning down all the files submitted after my original request...seeing that they all get longer in length.

Accepting.

nymx: Replacing with the 323 version, made with the Stella core.

Because we don't know how much time a "speed runner" takes in producing the best maze, we have nothing to compare against. In my opinion, that kind of human run should be clocked from the very start of the effort. If that was done, then we could certainly solidify a judgement on this. Instead, I'm accepting this because it appears to be out of reach for any human to find the results of this movie. Yes...the IGT part is slower, but this TAS is way above human capabilities.

Accepting.

fsvgm777: Processing.