Lunar IPS vs rom-weaver

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.

rom-weaver is a free, open-source tool for patching and converting ROMs and disc images, and for assembling patch steps into reusable bundles. Its browser and command-line editions share an engine. Users can apply patches, create patches from ROMs, and arrange ordered workflows. The support matrix includes formats such as IPS, IPS32, BPS, UPS, xdelta, and PPF, with some format-specific limits. The tool can inspect and extract many archive and compressed image formats, including ZIP, 7z, RAR, CHD, RVZ, and Z3DS; creation support depends on the format. It can bake supported cheat codes into ROMs or save selected database cheats as patch files, but runtime-memory cheats are unsupported. Save editing covers specified Pokémon save layouts and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past SRAM, subject to game recognition limits. The browser uses WebAssembly to process files on the device; the CLI reads and writes local paths. The maker says files and results are not uploaded. The browser app can work offline after caching. It is available for web, self-hosting, Linux, macOS, and Windows, and requires no account.