Appearing on start-up means that there's no time to input any commands—

Or more importantly, to alter any random values. How could that chance even exist?

That's a good point. It's obvious when you think about it.

How did everyone believe an urban legend like this?

Oh, c'mon! Legends are made to be believed in, right?

True, I guess.

Thing is, consoles like this with no internal clock have no mechanism to let them generate random numbers on start-up. The values there have to be fixed.

Well, I guess it'd be possible if they stuck the clock in the cartridge instead, but anyway.