(Link to video)
Submission Text Full Submission Page

Introduction

This movie obsoletes [3542] A2600 Frogger by Alyosha in 01:34.62. There, Alyosha discovered that delaying the start by 2 frames, you get dealt a better hand on the first stages. But he also mentions that probably an exhaustive bot-based method might find a better solution for the overall game. Here it is.

Software + Hardware

Rom Information

Rom: Frogger (1982) (Parker Bros)
  • SHA1: E859B935A36494F3C4B4BF5547392600FB9C96F0
  • MD5: 081E2C114C9C20B61ACF25FC95C71BF4

Emulator

  • EmuHawk 2.8.0 (Core: Atari2600Hawk)

Routing Bot

  • Bot: JaffarPlus
  • Routing Core: Stella - Disabled TIA
  • Platform: 'The Jaffanator' - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (64 cores, 128 threads) + 256Gb RAM (Average Exploration Performance: 0.7M States/s)

Comparison Movie


Timing Table

                       Old                     New                    Diff
  Stage      Initial         Total       Initial     Total       Stage     Total
   Boot            0          441             0       441           0       0
    1            441          424           441       424           0       0
Transition       865          436           865       436           0       0
    2           1301          506          1301       404        -102       -102
Transition      1807          436          1705       436           0       0
    3           2243          352          2141       444          92       92
Transition      2595          436          2585       436           0       0
    4           3031          588          3021       382        -206       -206
Transition      3619          436          3403       436           0       0
    5           4055          642          3839       430        -212       -212
Transition      4697          436          4269       436           0       0
    6           5133          536          4705       372        -164       -164
Movie End       5669                       5077                             -592

This is my anticipated April's fools submission. It's a serious movie tho. Where's the joke? I spent around 50 hours adapting the Stella emulator to run with my bot. Atari 2600 emulation is extremely complicated due to the interaction between the different chips, especially the TIA. I am so tired of this, I wanna go back to NES.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

TASVideoAgent
They/Them
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Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 13267
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #8119: eien86's A2600 Frogger "any%" in 01:24.71
Challenger
He/Him
Experienced Forum User, Skilled player (1554)
Joined: 2/23/2016
Posts: 995
Wow Jaffar even polished the gameplay by waiting much less between stages while bruteforcing the game. Very nice work. Yes vote.
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
Alyosha
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Editor, Experienced Forum User, Expert player (3127)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2567
Location: US
Nice, always cool too see more advancements in Jaffar-bot technology. Games like this never felt quite done as there was only so much time and effort to put into searching by hand, really glad to see things like 'The Jaffanator' giving a more satisfying solution. Also I feel your pain regarding A2600 emulation, glad the result still synced in BizHawk after all the work you put into it, (most games should, but with A2600 you never really know for sure.)
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 1/3/2018
Posts: 52
Thank you man! Appreciate that you've made this TAS a LOT. It's a different version of the game than Atari 65 XL/XE's, but it brings back old very good memories. It was the only game that my mother liked... :' ) As such, Frogger has a special place in my heart. Thank you, once again...!
eien86
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Joined: 3/21/2021
Posts: 78
Location: Switzerland
PLANET wrote:
Thank you man! Appreciate that you've made this TAS a LOT. It's a different version of the game than Atari 65 XL/XE's, but it brings back old very good memories. It was the only game that my mother liked... :' ) As such, Frogger has a special place in my heart. Thank you, once again...!
Hey PLANET, I'm very happy you liked this one and that it brought such nice memories. That alone made the time spent on the Atari emulator worth it ;)

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