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Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years?

If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions selling 65 million copies. What you probably don't know is the game's great untold secret. Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to

MAME is an emulator that was originally targeted at arcade hardware, however it has support for hundreds of game consoles and home computer systems thanks to merging with the MESS project. My heart sank a little at this news; 6502 assembly is cumbersome to understand at the best of times, and throwing a BASIC virtual machine on top of that makes live debugging even worse. Applesoft BASIC is majestically slow, but thanks to 40-bit floating point and standard commands for drawing and text manipulation, Oregon Trail works much better than I could have expected after running the simulation for 14272 years.

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