Feature request: Load patch which has the same filename with booted rom automatically about mgba

[tony971]

Is loading an un-patched ROM with a separate IPS a thing? I thought patches had to be applied to the ROM.

[endrift]

Tentatively putting in 0.4.0. I might get to it in 0.3.0, but it's not a hugely important feature.

[endrift]

Added in 071fe7f.

[Zeturic]

Is there really not a way to disable this?

Currently, I have it set to look for patches in a read-only folder without any patches in it, because that seems to be the only way.

[zeromus]

Typically one does not even get patches with the same name as the booted rom without renaming Cool Game (patch that does XYZ edition).ips to Cool Game.ips alongside Cool Game.rom, so most people's workaround is to never do that in the first place unless they want to run a patch.

Loading game.ips, along with game.sav and game.cheats and game.this and game.that without any provision for altering that is behaviour from the most ancient of times. So don't act so shocked.

[endrift]

I don't see the problem. Why would you be naming your patches the same as your ROM if you didn't want it to autoload?

[Zeturic]

I don't see the point of the feature in general. 99% of the time if someone has a ROM the name as a patch, they'll have already applied the patch themselves and so the autoload will do nothing. What's the use case - somebody wants to keep the actual ROM on disk unmodified so they'll be confused when they open it in another emulator that doesn't autopatch?

My problem was that I applied a newer version of a patch to the ROM, but happened to have an older version of the patch in the same directory as the ROM, and so it was being applied when I didn't want it to be.

In all of my time using mGBA I'd always manually applied patches (read: up until now, I'd always been in the situation that autoloading was a no-op), so I had no idea that auto-loading patches was even a thing, so the frankenstein combination of an old and current version of a patch was very confusing.

[zeromus]

Believe it or not, 99% of the time people have a rom the same name as a patch, they're expecting the patch to be automatically applied; because that's how it works most of the time. Typically the patch file would have a version number in it, and (I think--I dont do things this way myself, but fact is, most people must or else this feature would not be so universally adopted) you would copy the rom to have a name that matches the patch, and let the patch get applied automatically.

There are theoretical advantages to doing it this way. The emulator could check the rom against its database unpatched, make intelligent decisions, and then apply the patch. If you patch it yourself, it couldn't do that.

This also improves the workflow for the people building the patch, for whatever that's worth.

Yeah, automagic is often confusing. It's simple until it isn't.

Patches are more generally applied to disc images manually, though. I don't see why we can't force everyone to automatically apply patches, but that ship has sailed long ago.