Road Runner

Road Runner

Registry name: roadrunner. Parity status in games_covered.md: 🥉.

Description

Outrun Wile E. Coyote along a scrolling desert highway while collecting birdseed and dodging trucks, mines, cliffs, cannons, and rockets. Jump with the fire button. The Road Runner loses a life when caught by the coyote, hit by a truck or cannonball, landing on a mine, falling into a ravine, or (in later cartridge levels) hit by a falling rock.

This Jaxtari port currently implements levels 1–4. The Atari 2600 cartridge has 8 levels that escalate in difficulty; after level 8 the layouts loop while difficulty continues to rise. Features required for levels 5–8 are summarized below (from the official Atari manual and observed ALE / TAS level structure).

Actions

Observations

  • player / enemy — ObjectObservation with facing (orientation) and pose/mode (state: jump/fall/death; flattened/burnt/rocket)

  • ravines (n=3), seeds (n=4, visual_id = pickup type), truck, landmine, bullet, cannon

  • score, lives, current_level, score_popup (bottom-of-screen gain while timer active)

Reward

Modifications

Registered via RoadRunnerEnvMod:

  • invert_colors

  • hue_shift

  • invisible_enemy

  • harmless_ravines

  • no_road_stripes

  • invisible_trucks

Implemented levels (1–4)

  • Level 1 — Open highway with trucks and birdseed; coyote chase tutorial.

  • Level 2 — Narrower road with ravines (cliffs) and ravine-linked mines/birdseed.

  • Level 3 — Dynamic road width, trucks, mines, steel-shot signage, coyote roller-skate / speed-phase chase.

  • Level 4 — Offramps with bridges, fixed cannons and bullets, coyote rocket patrol.

Missing levels (5–8) and required features

The cartridge ships eight distinct levels. Levels 5–8 are not present in DEFAULT_LEVELS. Reaching ALE/manual parity needs the following.

Shared systems still incomplete or unused for later stages

  • Falling rocks — Manual hazard: deadly boulders that block the road and kill on contact. Not implemented as entities, collision, or sprites. Required especially for level 6; also denser in later loops.

  • Steel shot pickup + magnet — Manual: eating steel shot scores points but Wile E.’s magnet makes escape temporarily harder. Level 3 has steel-shot signage and mixed pickup weights, but there is no dedicated steel-shot pickup type or magnet pull / temporary chase boost.

  • Rocket skates (hoverboard charge) — Manual / TAS: when the coyote scrolls off-screen he charges back on roller/rocket skates. Level 3 uses a speed-phase multiplier and hoverboard sprites exist, but a full off-screen → skate-charge state machine matching ALE is still incomplete for later levels.

  • Level configs 5–8 — New LevelConfig entries (scroll length, road geometry, spawn tables, coyote modes) wired into DEFAULT_LEVELS, plus end-of-level banners if assets are added.

  • Post–level-8 loop — Cartridge loops layouts with higher hazard density / coyote aggression; optional for RL use.

Per-level content to add

  • Level 5 — Mix of earlier hazards (mines, trucks, birdseed/steel shot) with denser coyote trapping; no unique hazard type beyond combinations already sketched in levels 1–3.

  • Level 6 — Falling-rock segments as the signature hazard (dodge or jump; coyote remains free to chase while rocks block the path).

  • Level 7 — Escalation of level-5 style (more seeds/shot, more luring coyote into traps); typically combines mines/trucks with aggressive skate chase.

  • Level 8 — Level-4-like finale: cannons firing along the road plus coyote rocket capture; completing it finishes one full cartridge loop.

Assets / constants likely needed

  • Falling-rock sprites and spawn/collision logic.

  • Steel-shot sprite as a real pickup (distinct from birdseed / puddle / quad seed) and magnet chase modifiers.

  • Optional end-of-level artwork for levels 5–8.

  • Balanced spawn intervals and coyote phase tables so difficulty ramps across 5–8 without the level-4 coyote-ahead softlock class of bugs.

Reference: AtariAge Road Runner manual.

Known issues

  • Only four of eight cartridge levels are playable.

  • Falling rocks and magnet / steel-shot chase interactions are not implemented.

  • Coyote skate-charge when fully off-screen may still diverge from ALE timing.