Never had to ID unknown patches before. Save games, ROMs, savestates and cheats sure but patches is new.
Does UPS come with any kind of checksum verification? If it does then should be easy enough to pull that and scan goodtools, no-intro, advanscene and whatever other dat providers you care to contemplate for the given checksum.
Beyond that you are left with names (do also consider subtitle and hack names -- g2r2 might well speak to say pokemon green as well as gears of war 2), dates (assuming they are accurate), anything that might be in the same folder/cart/SD card (possibly including playing with file recovery tools to see what goes), internal size/location of patch (you tend not to get 32 megabyte NES games, 32 megabytes on the GBA then all day long), interests of the owner (or their interests at the time) and whatever else falls from that. Give me a list of 10 candidate ROMs and I might be able to line up changes to things that make sense to change but no chance of anything I would like to use in an automation capacity*. I would not necessarily read too much into the patch format as UPS was kind of popular as a replacement for IPS before everybody shifted to more serious things. If you want to force the change on a blank file then the changes might also be something to look at -- a translated script almost necessarily includes the translated script (give or take a few holes for matching sections, and whatever relinking ability the patcher has) so clue from context there (hopefully a relative search, possibly for something like " the " which is bound to feature in most English scripts somewhere and with that you have the table), or if it is a tile edit then that too might be obvious (or a candidate for a reverse image search)
*combine a ROM map, or maybe just "is FF/00 for destination", a la some of those patch collision detectors and you might get a weak heuristic (not all games will expand to 00 filled space, some will be in place for everything, some will overwrite what they are changing, some non 00/FF will still be useless data or useless data for that given hack). Would be one of the more boring uses of a complete ROM set I have ever contemplated (normally I do fun things like see what percentage of the library uses this file format, usually sound) but a use never the less. There have been some things that ponder whether something is assembly or not (not a trivial task from static analysis but you could do something), and some compression detection stuff you could also wind into this.
Topic: Finding which game a patch goes to? (Read 534 times)