GoKawiilslap
context context A rom patcher takes a game file and applies a “patch” file to it. The patch is a recipe for turning the original file into some sort of variant of itself, such as a translation, a bugfix, or some other romhack thing. By convention, the way to distribute your game-modding work is to make and distribute a patch meant to be applied to the original.
I made a rom patcher. It’s good. It’s free/FOSS, multiplatform, supports twenty formats, cute, fast, and makes small patches.
I built it because I couldn’t find a CLI tool, available on Linux, that I cared for, that would play nice with applying the patches I needed to prep my FXPak. So it is in part built for scripting nicely. But it is also very chatty. It has structured errors/warnings/observations for all sorts of things.
It assumes nothing about a patch. I am fairly confident that it’ll handle anything that isn’t invalid gracefully; if something is malformed, or coherent but about to do something surprising, slap says exactly what and where.
Try it: cli version, web version. It is written in Haskell and Rust and this made getting it to work nicely in the browser, interesting.
It knows six verbs:
apply — patch + original rom → modified rom
create — two ROMs → patch
undo — patch + modified rom → original rom
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