Translation Patching Help

posted in Site News by akilla on Feb 5th, 2001

Recently there have been a number of (improperly placed) submissions asking for help with IPS patching, so I figured I'd make a quick post to help you all out. First off, you need the original ROM. The patch is not a ROM. Many people have been asking for help playing their IPS files in an emulator. This won't work. =) If you have a patch to translate FF3j to english, you need to find the original FF3J dump. Secondly, you need a Patch. Get one of these from the Translation Patches page. Download it, uncompress it, then proceed to step three. Thirdly, you need an IPS patcher. You can get one of these from the General Utilities page. Download it, uncompress it, then proceed to step four. Fourth and final step... For the most part, you should refer to the documentation for the specific IPS patcher. Its small, its effective, and it's command-line! You need to apply the IPS patch to the ROM. I'll use the program I'm most familiar with as an example, the old DOS IPS.EXE program. I'm going to apply a FF3e patch to an FF3j ROM. So I went off and downloaded FF3J.NES, and got the FF3e patch off the NeoDemiForce page. I renamed it to FF3E.IPS, and put it in the same directory as FF3J.NES and IPS.EXE. Now, I go to a dos prompt and go to the directory that I put everything in. I type: IPS FF3J.NES FF3E.IPS The usage is IPS [ROM file] [IPS patch]. If you downloaded the proper original ROM for the patch, and followed the instructions properly, then you will now have a translated ROM file! Enjoy! =) Update: Jose emailed me notifying me that ZSNES has built-in IPS patching support, without having to modify the ROM. To do this, you have to rename the IPS to the same thing as the ROM. (If your ROM is named FF6.SMC, name the patch FF6.IPS) Then, put the renamed patch in your ZSNES save states directory. He mentions that there are problems with doing this with some games, specifically the Bastard! patch and the ToP patch. If anyone has done further research, please contact me.