Table of contents
Introduction
A natural continuation of my work with off-road racing games (see: [5294] NES Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road by eien86 in 50:31.34), this time for its SNES port. I really enjoyed botting this game, with all its quirks.
Category Choice
This game contains 16 different tracks. Each of them contain 4 variations: forward/backwards direction, and with/without hay bales. This brings the total number of distinct races to 64, which cycle around once the race index goes back to zero. A detailed information can be found in this forum post.
In the SR leaderboards RTA players choose the faster goal of maximizing stats and getting 99 nitros. Since I had no problem with longer goals (because I am TASing), I chose instead to TAS all those 64 variations, getting all upgrades along the way. There is nothing else about this game, so this can be considered full completion.
Software + Hardware
Rom Information
- Name: Super Off Road (USA)
- ROM: Super Off Road (U) [!].smc
- SHA1:1784C53C1B60047337109A5A9BF6A638D77B4219
- MD5:0C1CC5369A31C988858A087598BAB9C3
Emulator
- EmuHawk 2.10 (Core: Snes9x)
Routing Bot
- Bot: JaffarPlus
- Routing Core: QuickerSnes9x
- Platform:
- 2 x AMD Epyc 7742 (128 cores, 256 threads) + 384Gb RAM
- Exploration Rate: 0.27 Mstates/s
Strategy
There is a money/shop component that requires some planning ahead. I decided to pursue engine performance first, as I reckon that would have the largest effect if bought early on.
I'm pretty sure some deeper strategic planning might result in a faster movie, but we'll see if somebody wants to take that challenge.
Unlike the NES variant, bonuses (turbos and cash) are much harder to get along the way, so I decreased their importance in the bot's reward function. This movie goes for pure driving skills and only eventually got something along the way.