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Adding Your Own Hack

Thank you for allowing your ROM hack to be hosted on Team Aqua Rom Patchers website!

To add your patching page, you can fork the repository, create and make edits in your patcher's own folder, and open a pull request. Once your PR is reviewed by a maintainer, your patcher may be added to the homepage. None of the necessary edits require HTML knowledge and are all contained within your patching page folder — no changes to other parts of the site are required.

ROM Patching Page

Firstly we'll create your very own patching page, allowing information about your ROM hack to be displayed, external sites to be linked, and of course your patches downloaded or applied to a ROM.

└── template
+   ├── patches
+       └── *
    ├── color.css
    ├── config.js
    ├── index.html
    ├── info.md
    ├── patches.info
+   └── patches.zip

Visuals

  1. Duplicate the hacks/template folder and rename it to match the name of your game, with no spaces.

    Note: This will also be part of the pages URL.

  2. Inside your new folder, open config.js and edit it with your hack’s title: and the ROM base: used for your patches.
  3. Within this same file, the discord:, github:, pokécommunity: and/or reddit: fields can be filled with links in order to display buttons for each on your patching page.
  4. Add a high-resolution logo for your hack to your folder, named logo.png. This will appear at the top of your hack’s page.
  5. Open info.md. When adding more information such as screenshots, features, credits, etc. to this file, it will display the content on your hack page.
  6. Open color.css. Changing the value of --page-bg-color will change the background colour of the patching page.

Patches & Info

  1. Create a subfolder called patches within your patching page directory.

  2. Place your patch files inside it.

    Only .bps, .ups and .xdelta patches are able to be used.

  3. Open the patches.info file, which contains details about each patch.

    "patches": [
  {
    "file": "patchfile.bps",
    "name": "ROM Hack v1.0",
    "description": "",
    "outputName": "ROM Hack"
  }
]

    Edit the field shown above.

    • "file": is the patch file
    • "name": is the name displayed by the patcher
    • "description": is the description displayed by the patcher
    • "outputName": is the name of the patched ROM that is downloaded

  4. Create a patches.zip file in your patching page directory containing all of the patches.

    Note: This patch.zip file cannot exceed GitHub's 100MB maximum file size. If this zip file is too large, errors may occur with the patcher, although the exact file size that causes this is unknown. If either of these occur, try reducing the number of patches hosted.

    The python script patch_zipper.py in the root directory of this repo is provided to help generate a properly formatted .zip file from your patch folder. It can by run while parsing an argument containing the directory of your patching page directory, eg. python3 patch_zipper.py hacks/template.

Optional Extras

Other Images

Additional images can be added to your patching page, or any other place on the site, but this may require manual edits to HTML. A maintainer may assist if needed.

Automatic Patch Creator (Coming Soon)

While a patch can easily be created on the RomPatcher.js website, legally obtaining a Pokémon Emerald, Pokémon FireRed or Pokémon LeafGreen ROM may not be possible for everyone. To help with this, there is a GitHub Action that automatically generates a patch file using pokeemerald or pokefirered when you create a release of your ROM hack on GitHub. This bypasses the need to obtain the ROM yourself, with the process usually taking around 15 minutes.