flips.rs vs Lunar IPS

flips.rs is a free, open-source Rust bindings library for Flips, the Floating IPS patcher. It applies UPS, IPS, and BPS patches, creates IPS and BPS patches, studies IPS patches, and reads BPS metadata. Although the README discusses video game cartridge ROM patching, the API can apply patches to arbitrary sources. The project says Flips creates small BPS and IPS files among widely used patchers. The crate supports no_std when its default std feature is disabled. It uses crc32fast instead of Flips’ naive CRC32 algorithm for BPS and UPS patch creation and application. Checksum verification is supported. Version 0.2.1 is listed, with flips-sys 0.2.1 as a dependency, and Martin Larralde as author. The library is licensed under GNU GPL version 3.0. Distribution links point to crates.io and docs.rs. The listed platform is Linux, and the plan is free.

Lunar IPS is a free Windows utility for creating and applying IPS patches, intended as a lightweight replacement for the SNESTool DOS program. It supports full run-length encoding and decoding, and can expand or truncate files. Its encoder produces IPS files no larger than those created with SNESTool and avoids the rare 0x454F46 EOF offset issue attributed to SNESTool’s encoder. Applying a patch can generate a ROMFileName.log file. Lunar IPS can register the .IPS file type in Windows, allowing a patch to be opened by double-clicking and then associated with a file to modify. IPS patching supports files up to 16 MB because the format uses 24-bit addressing, although an IPS file itself can be any size. Logging and file-registration settings are stored in the Windows registry. Version 1.03 is listed, updated February 2, 2022. The archive is 172K zipped or 437K unzipped, with command-line support and several listed language versions.