Alright, I found 42 different RNG options, about half of which lose 0 frames and half lose 1 frame. Expanding to 2 frames would immensely increase the options of course.
Also, most if not all of the 0 frame losses have Silence for the music; in my testing, you can do an Up or Down with the Start to choose Loginska or Troika at the cost of 1 lag frame, without changing the RNG. Would definitely want to do that for entertainment.
There's so many different ways you can input in the menus, and often, taking 2 or 3 frames on one menu will just reduce a lag frame in another menu, breaking even. And with both controllers active, you can do a lot of crazy things. For instance, to go Up to max level and max garbage, you can use Select or Down if you have 2 frames to play with:
And that'll get you different RNG, presumably because of different amount of cycles used.
Here's the BizHawk 2.4 tasproj that has a branch for each of these 42 options (and I'm sure I missed some):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LOf4A6-cuLEWE1f1rbochfz2lyUF93N1
I have faith that at least one of these can do a clean 8 line clear run. Then the question would be, which can do an 8 line clear the fastest... Which is not my expertise, optimizing Tetris input seems very difficult.
Added an I-piece drought list to the Lua script, as that's probably the most crucial indicator of if a given RNG can possibly do an 8 line clear.
trying some of the options now, prioritizing ones with only one missing block in the top row of their garbage
41/218 (branch 35) likely failure due to massive 23 piece I-drought at the start
155/97 (branch 34) 150 frame faster input end; 9 line clears; but a lot of keeping the stack extremely high; might be worth keeping and optimizing further
This RNG went very well; keeping the stack high like that and using the 18 free blocks in the garbage is almost definitely more important than one less line clear animation...
(I have improved it by 11 frames since, by delaying the last Tetris a couple moves to have more height)
Well, I submitted that. that took less RNG digging than I expected
http://tasvideos.org/6635S.html
Currently creating a BizHawk 2.4 tasproj that has a branch for every possible starting RNG I can find. There are a surprising number of them that lose 0 or 1 frames; it must be cycle-based.
