This is the result of work from scahfy and Weregoose to create the game using a much more efficient method followed by my attempts to TAS it. My biggest concern is that this may not be enough of a difference to be publishable. This version of Snake does not place food pieces inside of the snake which means the position of the snake's body can be used to somewhat manipulate where food will appear (although much less so in the early game). This version also re-seeds the RNG at the segment drawing edge if a direction is pressed (other than back in the direction the snake is coming from). The effect is that you can press a button once per segment redraw and re-seed the RNG, but this makes things go slower because it takes more frames to re-seed the RNG.
Ultimately, if there's no piece nearby you can reposition yourself (very ineffective in the early game it would appear) or you can make yourself go slower in the hopes that you can make food appear closer to you. The catch is this method effectively has as many opportunities to manipulate the RNG as there are segments left to draw. This leads to an annoying catch-22 - you can manipulate a new piece of food next to you but if you do that, say, two spaces away from you you now only have two opportunities to manipulate a good position on the next apple that appears.
At any rate, I'd like feedback on whether this is worth continuing. My best estimate is that this will clock in at a good 12 minutes or longer.