I'm thrilled to announce that it is finally done: I can safely say that I am the first person in history to survive 15,000 years in The Oregon Trail, AND, with the incredible technical assistance of @moralrecordings.bsky.social , the first to successfully arrive in Oregon after doing so. - ThreadSky

albrot.bsky.social • 45 days ago

I'm thrilled to announce that it is finally done: I can safely say that I am the first person in history to survive 15,000 years in The Oregon Trail, AND, with the incredible technical assistance of @moralrecordings.bsky.social , the first to successfully arrive in Oregon after doing so.

Comments

albrot.bsky.social•45 days ago

For anyone wondering, this all hinges on a bug I discovered: Waiting to advance a day in the game can be just as lethal as traveling, EXCEPT when at a river. An oversight in coding made your party remain alive and in decent shape infinitely, so long as you're waiting for river conditions to improve.

albrot.bsky.social•45 days ago

I set up a hotkey script to wait over and over and let the emulator run at maximum speed for 4 and a half days. The entire endeavor was streamed at https://twitch.tv/albrot

albrot.bsky.social•45 days ago

Of course, once you continue on the trail, the effects of being without food for 15,000 years rapidly kill your party, no matter how quickly you hunt for more.
@moralrecordings.bsky.social helped me identify the variables and memory locations to overwrite to allow our lives to continue.

albrot.bsky.social•45 days ago

And then, to top it all off, there's hard coding at the end of the game that assumes you will be arriving in the 1800s, and breaks at the finish line if you do not. @moralrecordings.bsky.social once again helped by decompiling the source code and rewriting the end of the game to accept the year.

albrot.bsky.social•45 days ago

I can't stress enough how amazing moral was through all of this. If you find any of this interesting, please check out moral's writeup of the challenge:
https://moral.net.au/writing/2025/01/11/waiting_for_oregon/

forgottenoregon.bsky.social•35 days ago

Did you get dysentery?

mostech6502.bsky.social•45 days ago

I was quite surprised last year when I started looking a bit into Oregon Trail to find that at its heart it's a BASIC game - with a few assembly routines along the way, esp. for hunting and the Dalles float, some of the image drawing / UI stuff