[Pickle]

So the patches for the SaGa 3 remake were made a on a bad dump. This type of thing is frustrating to users like myself that actually get the legit cart.

http://www.romhacking.net/translations/1705/

So ive done a comparison between the bad dump and the good and the delta is minimal. There are 2 sections that are 0'd out on the bad dump which contain some data in the good.
Other good news is that the bad patched game does not modify these 2 section.

So i took the patched bad rom and copied over the 2 small sections.
This should result in what a patched good rom should result in.

So then i ran the xdelta program that came with the rom to create a patch.
I was hoping that the result would be the same and maybe a couple bytes would change for something like crc.
But no i ended up with 63 mb file vs a 2300 kb file.

Edit:
The xdelta that comes with Saga 2 patch gave a 3500 kb file
The xdelta on the utilities gave a 64 mb (assuming this is what came with Saga 3)

Any suggestions?

[KingMike]

I was wondering if it was one of those DSi Enhanced games, as it was only a couple years ago I think someone figured out how to properly dump it.

But no, it doesn't look like it (has a NTR- serial which indicates normal DS game, versus a TWL- serial which signifies a DSi Enhanced/Required game)

[Pickle]

So i think ive got it working with the original xdelta program. I used this command:

xdelta3-3.0.11-x86_64.exe -9 -S djw -B 536870912 -e -vfs "SaGa3_dump.nds" "Saga3_patched.nds" "D0C79AE7_to_7AB925CE.xdelta3"

Testing the patch produced a matching binary.
Its also 2400 kb

I could put the patch on location if someone wants to take a look.

[SCO]

When i tacked this for myself i patched the rom the hack wanted and then made a new patch from the no-intro to the patched bad rom. Your approach should be cleaner though.


Are you sure you're using decrypted roms for both sources? Some of the newer console dumps have both encrypted and decrypted dumps and sane patches use the decrypted sources (for obvious size reasons). I don't know about the NDS but DAT-matic says it's something that happens for that set:

http://datomatic.no-intro.org/?page=download&fun=dat

(select Nintendo DS on the dropdown, click on "Standard DAT" - not download).

I dunno, it shouldn't matter because the difference you say you verified was so small it should be really obvious if the source roms were differently encrypted (or differently byteswapped which is another problem that causes uses patches on the Nintendo 64).

edit: so you fixed it and it was just missing compression? Weird. Anyway, i'll probably use your project. I hate it when a hack forces badly dumped roms on me (i'd like it even better to not be forced to use hardpatching but emulators are exceptionally bad at softpatching anything over 6mb).