- Captain Planet
- Dirty Harry
- Infiltrator
- Mad Max
- Paperboy
- The Last Starfighter
I'm wondering if instead you've discovered that the first controller read after reset (or certain situations?) might be unreliable (or reliably corrupted?) on some carts? Is 1 extra poll consistent for the games where it is needed, or do they only have a chance of working?
Low G Man does have a known bug that reads somewhere in the open-bus WRAM region at times (during boss music, and I think when using the boomerang weapon, not sure when else). In the bug I know about, as long as the read value is above a certain value it should have a consistent result (just checks if under a threshold and otherwise returns, I think)... though it's possible there is something else to do with this that might affect a controller read. The extent of my investigation was just to get it to not crash or visibly mess up, I wasn't as rigorous as a TAS verification. (I had made a patch that filled WRAM with $FF at startup, which seemed as good as open bus for the purposes I tested.)