Floating IPS (Flips) vs Lunar IPS

Floating IPS (Flips) patches IPS and BPS files. It provides Windows and GTK+ graphical interfaces, command-line support, and a command-line-only build, and is listed for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The GUI can apply multiple patches to the same ROM and create multiple resulting ROMs. For BPS patches, it can remember earlier ROM choices and reuse one when it determines that it matches. The GUI can also launch another program after patching, allowing an emulator to start after a BPS file is patched. The project says Flips creates very small IPS patches and the smallest BPS patches of any known tool, and that it is faster than comparable creators. It is free and licensed under GNU General Public License version 3.0 or higher. The project is in maintenance mode: bug reports and pull requests will be read, but feature requests are unlikely to be implemented. GitHub marks the repository archived and read-only since May 21, 2025. Releases are automated for each commit, with an erratic schedule that can include identical releases.

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.