RE: ROM Patching

[Europia79]

RE: https://igir.io/roms/patching/

heya @emmercm

I had some ideas for ROM patching (some fairly simple, and some probably out-of-scope) and was curious if you'd want to expand support for additional features (here) ?

Like, for the CRC32 prefix/suffix, I was wondering if you could support an alternative syntax using (Tags), in parentheses, OR, [Flags], in square-brackets ? This is because, when you look at all the different naming conventions, they are drastically different, however, this is a common theme among them: To encapsulate this "meta information" about a game file with either "(Tags)" or "[Flags]". Like, me personally, I think that a [Flag] would be more appropriate here; however, someone else may want to use a (Tag) instead.

Additionally, if the (Tag) or [Flag] was "named" with a prefix of 0x (for example)—like, [0xdeadbeef], then realistically, it could theoretically appear anywhere in the filename and still be easily parseable, right ? Altho, me personally, I would prefer to just still suffix them at the end, as:

• Filename (Tags)-[0xdeadbeef].ext

Where the dash is completely insignificant, and could be space, no space, underscore (w/e), depending on which naming scheme someone is using.

Also, I frequently help people with various patching problems, and I think I've come up with some cool tricks to help facilitate easier & more accurate patching: Most are probably out-of-scope for the IGIR project; However, if you're interested and have time, I can go into further detail here ?

Altho, there is one idea that I think could be easily supported by IGIR ? And that is BULK PATCHING, for both creating and applying patches ? You already support applying patches in bulk, however, I think that the bulk creation of patches would be a really cool feature. This is because, with helping so many people with different patching issues, sometimes I think it'd be far easier to just generate a Set of Bulk Patches for them (with IGIR), and then, they can (hopefully) more easily apply them, in bulk, with IGIR ?

Anyways, that's the idea, in theory: To curate these "hacksets" (the actual ROM Hack files) that are audited for correctness (by more experienced Users), then be able to easily generate them (the patches) with IGIR, and give them to Players who can easily apply them with IGIR (presumably because any patching issues have already been fixed by the Set Curator).

Like, it wouldn't prevent me from getting inundated with help requests—but at least, hopefully, I'd be able to point them to an easier option ?

Thanks!
Euro

[emmercm]

Hi @Europia79, those other CRC32 formats are actually supported already, except for the 0x format. I've added support for the 0x format and clarified the documentation with #2069.

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RE: patch creation, I don't think that's aligned with Igir's goal of organization of playable ROM files. The Igir docs direct people to Rom Patcher JS for patch creation, it's one of the better all-in-one tools I've found. But I'm sure there are other quality CLI tools available.