NES Tetris (1989) - Level 19 Maxout score (1,002,100) NTSC Mesen Emulator

nestris.org game log: https://nestris.org/game/bb3fa5b5-94e... On my incredible ASUS Vivobook X413EA laptop I've managed to do one of my most difficult gaming feats. While it's obviously not as impressive as the feats of many skilled players in this game I'm pretty satisfied that I managed a level 19 maxout when originally playing this game as a newbie I could barely get a single tetris on level 19. I proudly named the maxout as "Bobby" because it's the name of my dog that passed away in December and I thought it was nice to dedicate the maxout to him as a lot of my progression towards this particular maxout was done with him sleeping at my side. This was done with Mesen and the TetrisGYM rom patch, I wanted to display the inputs and disable pausing the game so that I wouldn't accidentally mess anything up. In the past I got many maxouts using the faster DAS game-genie codes, that actually did help me get used to those speeds because one of the challenges of playing this game is definitely piece movement. While the game might look easy in a video it is very deceiving and trying level 19 as a new player can be demotivating. The differences between the 1989 Tetris and modern Tetris that you see on phones or most recent gaming consoles is the fact that special moves like t-spins don't give any points, you only get a 1-piece preview compared to modern which shows around 7 pieces in advance, the RNG is actually completely random rather than using the 7-bag randomiser so you can actually go over 100 pieces without seeing a long bar if you're absurdly unlucky. The only meaningful way to get points is to score a tetris which is 4 lines in a row with the long bar and when a piece touches the ground it locks in immediately, there also isn’t the option to hold a piece and you can't adjust the piece across the floor like modern tetris variants. When you play on level 19 in this version of the game the pieces take two-thirds of a second to hit the bottom of the screen and any adjustments you want to make e.g. sliding a piece into a gap or doing a piece spin have a 2-frame window of opportunity. The primary piece movement method is called "DAS (delayed auto-shift)" which is when you hold left or right on the d-pad and the piece shifts based on that, the DAS on NES Tetris is very weird and moves a piece one grid per 6-frames but only if you maintain the timing immaculately because if you mess up the timing then you get a 16-frame delay on the first shift of the piece and on level 19 that can screw up the movement of your piece entirely. Other than using DAS another method is tapping the piece manually as fast as you can. In my run of this I alternated between the two methods. A third popular method on the official hardware is called rolling where players have found a way to tap pieces a lot faster on the original controller by tapping the bottom of the controller with multiple fingers like a guitar hero player while pushing the controller to the fingers at the top of the controller, not an option for me on a laptop keyboard.