Chapter 70: xDelta Patching

This type of patching is unique in that it results in very small files and can be used for NDS hacking, though the latter is irrelevant for this tutorial.

There are two methods I will teach here: one with GUI, one without GUI. The one with GUI is nice and all, but the one without GUI is easier for the “final user”, the person who will ultimately play the patch, as it results in a simple drag-and-drop patching method. And what’s easier than a drag-and-drop patch? Not much. The downside is that non-Windows users won’t find Delta Patching very fun or easy.

First Method: Formal Program with GUI

First, download this:

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/704/

The download link is at the bottom.

Extract the files as usual. There are two programs here: DeltaPatcher and DeltaPatcher Lite. The difference is that the DeltaPatcher Lite can only apply patches. Thus it was intended to be included with the patch download so that people could apply patches without having to worry about the feature of creating one. To be honest, both are pretty easy to use, and if you can use the main one, you can use the Lite one, so I’m just going to teach the main one.

Boom, I explained most everything there. When you’re ready to apply the patch, hit “apply patch” (duh) and you’re all done.

To create a patch, you need to hit “Create xdelta patch”, which will change the top left area a little bit.

If you’ve been following the other patching tutorials this is all a complete, obvious piece of cake, except the compression level dropdown, which I explained above. Just hit “create patch” and you’re all done, and that’s method one. (Teehee, I rhymed)

Second Method: Batch File Editing, without GUI

This is not for the weak-hearted. The main purpose of this patch format is to make it so that the people who patch files only have to drag and drop the file to patch it.

Download this version of XDelta from my site:

http://www.feshrine.net/hacking/downloads/XDelta.zip

Extract it and you should see 3 files: Patch Creator, Patch Applyer, and xdelta itself. To start, never rename “xdelta” to anything else. Ever. Just don’t do it and you’ll be safe. I realize that people who know how this works can get away with renaming it to something else, but if you’re reading this tutorial you shouldn’t know how this works, or else you shouldn’t be reading this tutorial. :P

The other 2 files are batch files. Scary? Not really. You can edit them in any old text editor. I just right-click it and edit it with Notepad++, you can do something similar with Textpad or plain old Notepad or something. But don’t try Microsoft Word or Wordpad, those programs probably won’t work. You want something simple.

First, open the patch creator. Boom.

The black line points to the name of the original, clean, unedited file/ROM. In this case it’s “unmod.nds”, change it to whatever you want though, like “original.gba” or something. The green line points to the name of the patch file. This can be whatever you want, under any extension. To make life simple, keep everything lowercase and without spaces. If you didn’t already notice, the “.blz” extension is for “blazer” as I used this patch creator for my own patches. Heheh. =P

Once you’re done renaming that stuff, you need to actually put the unedited ROM there. So in my case I’d put “unmod.nds” in the folder. To make the patch, you simply drag the edited/hacked ROM onto the patch creator file, and a file called “patch.blz”, or whatever the heck you named it, will pop out.

Now, how do we use this patch? We use the patch applier. To setup the patch applier, edit it like you did the patch creator.

I realize this can be pretty intimidating at first but you really don’t have to do anything but change the “patch.blz” to whatever you named your patch to. Remember, it has to match what’s in the file!

Save it and close it. Test your patcher by dragging a clean ROM onto “Patch Applyer” (which I now realize should be spelled “Patch Applier”). A new ROM called “bla-patched.bla” should appear, where the “bla’s” are the name of the file and the extension of the file respectively. The point is, it’ll end in ‘-patched’, so you can’t not know which file is patched and which isn’t. Unless you’re dumb. But if you’re reading this I’d like to think you’re not dumb.

That’s that, for the most part. But let’s imagine we’re some internet guys just playing a hack for fun. We don’t need the patch creator, just xdelta, the patch applier, and the patch itself. Thus if you want to share a patch with someone easily, just include the patch applier, xdelta, and the xdelta patch file you made. The player just has to get a clean ROM and drag it onto the patch applier file and they’re done patching. It LITERALLY takes 1 second to drop it, maybe 3 seconds to make the patch if they’re unlucky, and maybe 6 seconds to find the ROM and get it to the right folder if they’re having a bad day. And if they can’t do that 10 second process successfully then they PROBABLY aren’t meant to play the hack.

And I can’t write a tutorial on THAT.