Patching is really not very complicated.
1) Not when the first patchers you're finding are crashing/unusable... 2) And then after you do find a patcher that doesn't crash, and it says that it worked, the game crashes upon playing it after the title screen cause nobody said anything about ROM header issues and the ROM used to work fine in Japanese... I thought I explained the problems here...
Step 2. Apply the IPS patch.
Use any IPS patcher out there. Lunar IPS is one, and it has a cute icon and windows GUI for folks who hate commandlines. Use whichever IPS patcher suits you, it doesn't matter.
Except that Lunar IPS was the first one I found...and it'd crash after selecting the IPS file, keeping me from even getting to select a ROM file. Sometimes just upon startup it crashes... A workaround was to run it on Windows 98 via emulation with MS Virtual PC. The second one I found was buggy too, and an old patcher I had was DOS 8.3 filename restricted, so no good either...
I never had a patcher crash on me, its job is supposed to be pretty simple,
like this, (1) select target file, (2) select patch file, (3) press patch/apply, the end. The recipient in principle should get a copy of the same patcher that YOU the creator used in a ZIP file, but if it was Lunar IPS, I still would've had the same crash problem anyway so no matter.
Rant: I could just provide two patches--one for headered ROMs, and one for headerless ROMs. I'd rather not. It is annoying to me that these SMC-headered dumps are still so prevalent and I wish they would stop being distributed. The headers are not part of the actual raw dumps. It is some useless shit tacked on by whatever antiquated piracy hardware was used to dump them. :\
Well, all you had to do here at least is tell the person to watch out for ROMs not 524,288 bytes in size, to check the size. If you look at my batch file, I use the correct 524,288 file size to determine/restrict action. Other patch algorithms support a CRC check on the target file, and patching won't continue unless you have the correct file...
That's really poor behavior on the IPS system to let the user continue patching a file that isn't the same size as the original that was used to create it... At least a file size check should be default and a CRC check optional as it is with PPF.
Anyway, it's FYI, just letting you know the "user experience" in trying to get this patched by just dropping an IPS file leaves much to be desired given good/bad versions of the ROM, and buggy IPS patchers that come up in searches... Far less people are gonna get to use your patch without some basics in a ReadMe.
