Floating IPS (Flips) vs Rompatcher

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.

Rompatcher is a free ROM patching tool for Linux and Windows, written in Rust. It applies patches and detects their formats automatically from their magic bytes. The listed formats are IPS, BPS, UPS, APS N64, APS GBA, EBP, RUP, PPF, xdelta and BDF, covering patch workflows for systems including Game Boy, NES, SNES, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, PlayStation and PSP.

Checksum verification is optional and supports CRC32, Adler32 and MD5. Rompatcher can look up ROM hashes for more than 15 consoles through RetroAchievements. The project describes its patch writes as transactional, using atomic writes and rollback if an error occurs. Without an output path, the command places a file in a patched/ directory, based on the ROM name with .patched and its extension. The README reports approximately 27 microseconds to patch a 1 MB ROM in IPS format. Installation instructions use Cargo to build from source, and the listed license is MIT OR Apache-2.0. The project page states no pricing or usage limits.