I Analyzed 28k+ Randomized ALttP ROMs So You Don't Have To

In my previous post Reverse Engineering A Link to the Past Randomizer I discussed developing Mudora, a Go tool to analyze randomized A Link to the Past ROMs even when they’re encrypted. This post is a follow up to that work, where I wanted to use my new tool to analyze a corpus of randomized games to see if there were any latent features that could speed up optimal play in ALttPR. I may have gone a little overboard… Generating the ROMs The good news is, getting randomized ROMs is pretty easy. You can, of course, do this via the website (https://alttpr.com) for one-off ROMs, but I needed a lot of data. Luckily the randomizer is open-source, so after downloading it and installing PHP and some dependencies, I could generate games. I used the default settings: From there it’s a simple loop over the CLI to generate a ton of ROMs. I kicked off 5 threads running this loop, but it filled up 50GB of my hard drive with ROMs, so I decided to stop early. I ended up with 28,193 randomized Zelda 3…