ROM + Patch = Hack?
WTF means Welcome To Facebook, right? It is easy to get things wrong in this day and age. Or you simply hear it for the first time. Let's try to get things right.
ROM (Read Only Memory)
In context of this side this is a game-dump. This can also be a ISO file it depends on the console. You can create one yourself before your cardrige/CD bites the dust, might be a good idea. Then you can continue playing the game with help of flashcards, emulators or other devices. Some find dumps with a web-search.. this is piracy.. you do not need to. More about this topic "Where to get ROMs" here.
Patch (IPS, BPS..)
Here we come to the meat why a lot of people like to have a ROM! You can patch it for a verioty of reasons. We are allowed to share our creation but we can not share a game when the IP (Intelectual Property) is part of copyrighted material!
So you are very welcome to up- or download patches from or to this side. There should be instruction on how to patch just where you got a patch. Most likely it will be a IPS/BPS file and you can soft-patch the ROM when draging, droping the patch on a emulator with the game running such as mesen. Not all emulators support this and require a pre-patched file. There are a verity of tools to create/apply this patches. Floating IPS is the most popular one. Or online toole here.
IPS will patch wrong files! But it is cool to mix small patches. BPS will perform checksum test among other things that prevent you from patching unintended files.
Hack
This can mean many things.. in context of this side it will be a patch you get or share here
Checksum/Hash, CRC32, SHA-1
As you can imagine there can be different dumps of the same game. A checksum of the dumped file is there to check that you have the correct file. There are many ways to generate a CRC32 or SHA-1 hash. For example this here
Possible issues to check when things don't match or work:
- NES This tool does clear byte 7-15 in the header.
- SNES Should be fine when the header is within standart size. Else try this tool.
- Genesis/Medadrive *.SMD *.BIN format issue. This tool might help.
- N64 Could be a issue with byte formating big-endien small endian. Here a converting tool
More Question?