A tribute to one of the best games on the Atari 2600
This article details a high-fidelity web port of the 1982 Atari 2600 game River Raid, which was rewritten in JavaScript from the original 6502 assembly code. The project aims for perfect accuracy by replicating the cartridge's specific behaviors, including its deterministic river generation and unique collision mechanics. The port has been verified against the original ROM to ensure that every frame and instruction matches the authentic hardware experience.
- ▪The game was ported by rewriting every 6502 instruction in JavaScript rather than using a standard emulator.
- ▪The river layout is identical in every playthrough because the game uses a fixed random number seed of $A814.
- ▪Verification against the original ROM showed zero differences across 45,000 compared frames of gameplay.
- ▪The entire game logic and graphics fit within a 4,096-byte cartridge, with the river generated procedurally just before it appears on screen.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Github |
| Canonical URL | https://plicerin.github.io/riverraid-rom-port/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 05 Oct 2026 01:54:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-05T03:42:14.958Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-05T03:42:14.958Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 57FAEh26wGPP · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
River Raid Activision · Atari 2600 · 1982 Carol Shaw's endless river, the same every time you fly it. The cartridge rebuilt from the original ROM, one instruction at a time: every bank, bridge, fuel depot and missile behaves as the real machine plays them. Play now Controls How it was built Play River Raid Press Play, then push up or fire to take off Exit full screen ▲ ◀ ▶ ▼ Fire ←→ steer · ↑↓ speed · Space fire · Enter Game Reset Game Reset Pause Mute Fullscreen How to play Fly up the river and shoot what gets in your way. Fuel drains the whole time: fly over a depot to fill the tank before the gauge reaches E. Touch a bank, a bridge or anything on the water and the jet goes down.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Github.
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