I've managed to find one small
improvement that saved 28 frames over the submission.
Shortly after, BizHawk 2.10 released with the Stella core. I realized that Stella is way more accurate with its loading. If you play the game on an actual Atari2600, resetting will cause the game to flash colours and take a longer time to generate a new maze. In my previous Atari2600Hawk TASes, I took advantage of being able to reset multiple times in succession to get a good seed quickly, which simply isn't possible on actual hardware.
So I ended up making a TAS that uses the
Stella core. The longer loading times meant that you can't advance the seed a lot before losing time. I'm of the personal opinion that the Stella TAS should be used due to its accuracy, but I don't know if that's my decision to make.
I asked a friend to look into the game and so far, she managed to find where the maze is stored in RAM and the RNG algorithm. She's still working on it, and it'll unfortunately take a while (likely a month), and there's a possibility that we might not even find anything better.
I don't think I've been very successful in making a run that's nearly as fast as the RTA WR and for that I'd like to apologize.
