Insane Difficulty: BPS and You: A Superior Patching Experience - Insane Difficulty

Hart-Hunt, on 14 February 2016 - 02:49 PM, said:

Down, boy.

BPS offers superior advantages to IPS in many ways for single-target patching. I've already outlined many of them.
BPS and IPS are both useful formats depending on what needs to be done.

BPS is an objectively superior format on a technical, programming, and coding level.
I merely stated that in niche circumstances of combining ROM patches then the error-correction wouldn't be ideal to use and IPS would work better in those specific scenarios.

Most ROM mods aren't typically meant to be combined with others. It depends on the mod itself and how they function with each other. As I mentioned, the LSA IPS Patch Compare can be used to discern possible issues/errors with combining more than one mod together. I actually released the 'Amnethen Apocalypse' rom mod collection for Dragon Warrior 1 on NES that was designed with several mods that are fully interchangeable with one another. And it was a pain in the ass to do any updates and it was from one source (myself) rather than different authors.

I very rarely if ever see other modders doing similar things unless they make a custom web-based patcher to customize the experience.

In my experience, very rarely are mods compatible with one another without bugs/glitches as a result of incompatabilities in specific patch data.

Just because you CAN do multiple IPS patches on top of one another doesn't mean it is a good idea unless they were designed that way by the modders in the first place.

And if you are combining multiple patches together, then it may be a good idea to make something similar to a web-based 'choose your own options' custom patcher instead. Depends on what the modder feels is worth the effort. There are always caveats to combining patches and doing double-checking to make sure there will be minimal/no issues or glitches involved in the resulting product.

Denton, on 14 February 2016 - 04:46 PM, said:

I've seen it enough to say that this is not just a highly niche case. Not least of which are the examples listed earlier in this thread.

Denton, on 14 February 2016 - 04:46 PM, said:

This is a true statement... but I'd guess literally everybody reading this thread already understood these points about patches. The modders I know around here do this often enough for it not to be a super-niche case.

Denton, on 14 February 2016 - 04:46 PM, said:

You can go to the effort of doing that. But I'm not sure most of the people that I know would consider it preferable to the IPS solution.

I second Lockirby's points 100%.

You can apply multiple bps patches on top of each other. That point is moot. The patch checksum is used for verifying the original ROM, e.g. to ensure that if the patch is meant for an unheadered ROM that you don't try to apply it to a headered ROM. If you want to ignore the checksum, such as for multiple patching, or if you used a headered ROM, and the header doesn't match (which has no effect on the ROM), then you're free to do so. The whole point of the checksum is to avoid the incredibly common user error of trying to apply the patch to the wrong ROM. But by all means, enjoy the never-ending annoyance of half your users coming to you complaining that the patch didn't work because they didn't RTFM and applied the patch to a headered ROM when it was supposed to be unheadered, or vice versa.

Hello Internet! Hello everyone from RHDN!
It has been months since this topic was brought up but it is far more relevant now that more and more of the hacking scene has been shifting towards newer portables (3DS) that IPS are no longer sufficient to cover.

qwerty brought up a great point in that the checksum feature of BPS can be bypassed/ignored entirely in order to apply multiple patches while ignoring the checksum.

I am hoping that we can get more mod authors willing to release their patches under permissive licenses that allow others to include them (entlrely) into their own patches upon condition of providing proper attribution and not commercially exploiting the patches. I've been leaning towards releasing my rom mods in that manner because I know that all of us at one point or another have learned from those who came before us through documents, forums, or more directly via other means. I believe it is only right to give back to the community.

BPS all the way; no more multiple patch formats and no more patching headaches.

Denton, on 07 November 2016 - 03:32 PM, said:

I guess I still think of this in different terms. I don't need BPS...all of these situations you speak of don't apply to me. Using IPS won't stop anyone from someone using my work if they want to. I'm honestly indifferent about that aspect of things.

I don't dispute that BPS may well be better overall, but it doesn't mean I need to use it. If a time comes when the "advantages" apply to me I would consider it, otherwise IPS is just fine for me.

I don't even get why this guy advertises it like it was his life mission. IPS works, we like it as is in here.