What are patches?
A patch in the context of this site is a file that contains a list of changes that an author has made to a game. This change can be a language translation, graphical, musical, or any other kind of alteration of the game. This file is essentially a list that says “change this byte to that byte” repeatedly. What ROM hackers do is take their altered ROM, and use a patching program to compare it to the original ROM. The program then makes a patch that you can use on an original ROM to produce the same results of the hacked ROM the ROM hacker has. You may be wondering why we don’t just distribute the modified ROM and not deal with the hassle of patches. We don’t do this for a few reasons. First, it is illegal. We cannot distribute copyrighted material. All non public domain ROMs contain intellectual property owned by their creators. Nintendo, Sega, Square, Acclaim, Capcom, etc.. own the characters, game data, and code contained in a ROM. Freely distributing this data is illegal and we wish
