This appears to be quite important for us (if not even critical). But what kind of beast is it in fact? How much do we know of it, can we teach others to fight it?
I mean, we now have guides for effectively every matter related to TASing:
- The process of TASing
- Making Lua tools
- Dealing with RNG
- Debugging
- Emulator tools required for TASing
- Guidelines on movie file
- Guidelines on savestates
So if one wants to TAS a game on some new platform, he can learn everything it takes to make it possible, from the lowest level, except... making it deterministic!
Our experts surely have an idea of how to find causes of non-determinism and fix them, and that means they must be able to tell something about it, then we could make up a list of things to look into in general cases of simply movies not syncing, and possibly even some more interesting ones too. I'm not asking to figure out why some things still desync, if it's yet not known. For complicated platforms it may be too much heavy lifting. But I believe 15 year old hardware is predictable enough to fall into at least one of the known desync causes.
So what emulator authors (or hackers) should get rid of, in hopes to make their system TASable?