Patching a rom on Linux

You will need to legally acquire a copy of the rom you intend to patch. I’m not aware of any terms and conditions that might allegedly apply to this activity. I am not a lawyer. Consider the disclaimer posted. Go bother someone else, Nintendo.

The other file you will need is the patch. This will probably have a .ips extension. The software that will be used to apply the patch is lazy-IPS, the source code of which can be (and perhaps should be) found and reviewed on github.

This step requires python3 setuptools. If you don't have those a relatively easy way of acquiring them is as follows:

First install pip: sudo apt install python3-pip then use pip to get the setup tools: pip3 install setuptools

You will either need gitor to download the source code as a zip file and decompress it. For purposes of this tutorial, we will assume git is installed and run the command git clone [https://github.com/btimofeev/lazy_ips.git](https://github.com/btimofeev/lazy_ips.git)

Now that you have what you need to install lazy-IPS, run this command inside the directory containing setup.py: python3 setup.py install

Typing lazy-ips in the terminal should launch a lightweight GUI that is pretty straight-forward to figure out on your own, but for our purposes we will use the following command structure in the terminal. Within a directory containing your target files, use the lazy-ips-cli command followed by your rom's filename as the first argument and the patch's filename as the second. Like this: lazy-ips-cli <name-of-rom.file> <name-of-patch.file>

For example:

cd ~/Downloads
lazy-ips-cli Super\ Metroid.smc Hyper\ Metroid\ UH\ v1.00.ips

The rom should now be patched and opening it in your emulation software should show that the desired changes have taken effect.