Final Zone Boss Manipulation/Pattern Generation Notes (TL;DR Included Below):

• It's been said that holding the d-pad and hitting the boss messes up the order. Upon testing however, there seems to be no indication of that. This COULD stem from running to the right, and hitting Eggman in the 4th crusher can cause you to bounce and hit him a second time while invulnerable. While you can safely hold buttons and hit him, hitting Eggman again, even while invulnerable, WILL change the RNG and hence the pattern.

• At the start of every level, including Final Zone, the RNG seed is reset to 0, meaning it cannot be manipulated outside of the level.

• Once Sonic has reached the x-coordinates $2450+, the RNG seed is added by 1 every frame. This does not increase while paused, and continues until the boss 'activates', where the seed will be used with the RNG function to generate the upcoming boss patterns, electricity etc.

~ This explains why there are 1:13 and fast 1:12 manips, because 1:13 will arrive and load at a consistent time, and with the fast 1:12, as long as the boss has been loaded prior to it activating, you will arrive in the chamber at the exact same time, causing the same patterns.

~ As a side note, the boss activates once the art for the boss has finished decompressing to avoid graphical glitches. This is done by checking an address ($FFF680) to see if there's any art left to decompress. As you know, this can be done during the pause where the game will decompress some tiles before stopping, needing another pause. What's noteworthy is that you don't have to spam pause, pauses around ~0.7s get the same results as spamming it really quickly without any of the danger.

• Hitting Eggman causes the RNG seed (high word) to be increased by 7. As mentioned above, this also includes when he's invulnerable.

• Pushing also counts as 'hitting' Eggman, and will also increase the RNG seed (high word) by 7, for every frame that Sonic is pushing against his crusher (the part of him that you can hit, not the base or the end). This is a good way to randomise the pattern, but since it rises every frame, this means that it's not predictable by a human. Since it is a relatively small base, you can notice patterns if you push the same crusher, depending on how long you push.

• Pushing a crusher without Eggman in it will NOT increase the RNG seed.

TL;DR:

• Don't bump into Eggman's piston twice in one cycle. Empty pistons are fine.
• Hold what you want when hitting Eggman. Just watch out for the double bump on the 1:13 strat.
• Take longer pauses as opposed to spamming to play it safe. Watch out for the pause rule, however.
• Push against Eggman's piston to randomise the layout. This is NOT predictable but patterns can be recognised on the same crusher.
• As long as the boss is instantly loaded in the 1:12 strat, it will ALWAYS be the same pattern.