Back in 1985 there was a TG cerlox binder with the rules used in the "1985 Video Game Masters Tournament". Each contest site was supposed to get a copy of rules. Unfortunately, not all contests sites had proper technicians to set the difficulty settings correctly.(posted 8538 days ago)The most famous example of this was colour vector game "Star Wars" where one contest site reported a score of over 31 million for David Palmer of Auburn California. Compare this to the current Funspot high score of 3.4 million. The settings were supposed to be 6 shields, no extra shields for destroying the death star, and difficulty level hard.
Now, as for "Bump N Jump" I refer to page 61 of the TG book (Sunstar Publishing 1998) where it says:
Bump N Jump (Midway) Diff: #3 hardest; Start: 3 cars; Bonus: limited, 1 car at 30,000
The listed high score is a somewhat inflated 2,413,182 points. These higher scores were most likely set with bonus cars every 30K. All the games I saw in North America were "Bump N Jump" but MAME says that the original game is "Burnin' Rubber". Both games appear identical. Looking at the TG web site, an even higher score 2,429,540 is listed by Marco Donadio. Unfortunately it's an old score from 1984 submitted from Italy, so I would imagine it's another case of bonus cars every 30K points. Ian Sutton appears to have the highest MAME score on "Burnin' Rubber" using the TG settings, but I haven't looked at the other inps.
I'm going to track scores for "Burnin' Rubber" as the official tournament rom for this particular game, and I'm going to track the scores for 1 clone "Bump N Jump". Possibly the scores will be merged together _if_ everyone is satisfied that both roms have the same gameplay.
Mark