I've been looking into this game the last couple days and figured out some interesting things as to how the game behaves or handles things so far.
The game only accepts inputs for movement every 4 frames.
The first frame you gain control entering a new room is seemingly random but (so far) is within 11-15 frames after the lag frames, might have something to do with how much it has to load when fading in a screen.
Attacking with your ranged attack will make the character stop moving when done on a frame where it accepts an input for movement but won't interrupt it when done on either of the 3 other frames, so there is no penalty for attacking except eventually creating lag.
It is pretty common for the game to lag enough to increase the number of frames it takes to accept another input of movement, however killing enemies and monster spawner generally leads to avoiding that lag.
When I reached the boss of dungeon #2 I ran into an issue though.
From running this game in RTA I know that he has 2 different patterns that he can give you:
- He moves very slowly towards you
- He rushes towards you
Since you can only have 2 projectiles at the same time on screen having him rush towards you is the preferred pattern as it will make you hit him faster and thus increase the rate of your shooting earlier.
The issue I had was him giving me the slow pattern. So I decided to just try to change the RNG by killing more enemies, getting hit, and all kinds of stuff that doesn't waste any frames in previous rooms. Nothing changed his pattern. So after that I decided to just wait outside of his room for different amounts of frames and just kill enemies in the meanwhile but nothing I did over the course of several hundreds of frames changed his pattern (I didn't check every single frame but rather every 20th). Finally after exactly 440 frames he gave me the preferred pattern and he would keep giving me that pattern throughout the next 120 frames entering his room.
Trying to figure out if I can find an Address that potentially shows RNG on my own with RAM Search I stumbled upon 000422. When it's value reached 25 on the first frame of the fade-in of the boss room it would give me the preferred pattern and it would last until a couple frames before the boss starts moving before changing the value to 26 would take over to the slow pattern again. I am still not entirely convinced if that Address is actually RNG but at least it seems to be accurate for that boss.
The value itself is pretty weird. Regardless of what I do it only advances every 256th frame. There are a couple restrictions to it though as following:
-Lag frames generally don't count towards the 256 frames
-When a screen fades out the first lag frame counts towards the 256 frames
-When entering an area from the overworld there is a single frame between the lag frames when loading where the first lag frame after that also counts towards the 256 frames
-When a screen fades in the 2nd non lag frame will be the first to count towards the 256 frames
- For the 2 boss rooms I've tested this so far it was 18 frames on the first and 4 frames on the second boss additionally after the lag frames that didn't count towards the 256 frames
So as I said the issue is that I arrive at the boss room when the value is still 23 and I'd need to wait 440 frames (which is probably longer than the fight itself even with the slow pattern) for it to be at 25 when entering the boss room on the fade-in. Since I'm not entirely convinced that this Address actually represents RNG for this game I might try to look further into it before moving on but eventually someone from here can help me out. I'd rather not continue with the slow pattern but if I can't get anything to work I might have to.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43467098245451509
If you remove the Up input on frame 8560 and replace it with an Up input on frame 9000-9120 you will get the preferred pattern.