With technology, things are almost never
random.When emulating (for a TAS run, as an example) the game can't gather any physical input to use as random data other than the player's button presses.
Outside of that scope, you can certainly get truly random numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_rand...umber_generator
Such as by collecting atmospheric noise, as random.org does it.
Since a hardware generator gathers it's input from a physical process that's outside the control of software,
if something with an HRNG is being emulated, then it would not be truly random, as both it's starting state and the algorithm that fuels it (for appearance to the software) would be known.
Outside of emulation, randomness exists because the hardware in a device is not in a set state at the "start" of any process (other than first boot, which is very unlikely here), and you can't realistically give precision input
on a frame-by-frame basis to influence things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random
QUOTEGutterman, Pinkas, & Reinman in March 2006 published a detailed cryptographic analysis of the Linux random number generator in which they describe several weaknesses. Perhaps the most severe issue they report is with embedded or Live CD systems such as routers and diskless clients,
for which the bootup state is predictable and the available supply of entropy from the environment may be limited.
