Read first: Important Patching Notes 1.7.4546+ - Pnach 2.0

[refraction]

With the advent of v1.7.4546 nightly, we have introduced a new patching system, which is an extension of the already existing pnach system, where you can now provide headers, comments and set certainly settings in the emulator with a patch, plus these can be toggled on and off by the user in the per-game settings.

Note: This new patch system is NOT backwards compatible, but old patches are forward compatible!

Firstly: Old patches will load unconditionally and not interact with the new cheats interface, however separate widescreen and no interlace patches have gone, so the old ones will no longer function as-is, aspect ration or deinterlace mode would need to be manually set. We have updated the patches which ship with PCSX2 to have these new headers and the no interlace and widescreen patches are combined in to a single patch file, so they will continue to work as they used to.

Secondly: cheats_ws and cheats_ni folders no longer function, everything will need to go in the "cheats" folder (or whatever you set it to in the folder settings) and will appear in the cheats tab of per game settings, if they have the new format.

Things you need to know:

In the new system you can create headers and groups to separate out items in the new cheats interface in to groups of several cheats, but also make individual cheats toggleable.

For example, this is some cheats and patches inside tree groups

Code:

[Cheats\No Money Cheat]   // This will make a "No Money Cheat" inside a group tree called "Cheats".
author=Ex Ample
description=This cheat takes away all your money (not really, this is just an example)
//Here's the patch, just showing you can still do comments
patch=1,EE,12345678,extended,12345678
patch=1,EE,31245678,extended,31245678

[Cheats\All Cats] // This will put the "All Cats" cheat as a separate header inside the "Cheats" group tree, with the cheat above.
description=Get all cats and pet them
patch=1,EE,21245678,extended,21245678

[Patches\Nudies] // This will make a new tree group called "Patches" and put a "Nudies" header inside it
description=Makes all the cats nude
patch=1,EE,21245677,extended,21245677

[Patches\Optional\I Know Kung Fu]  // Example of 2 layer grouping, so "Optional" group inside a "Patches" group.
description=Adds the matrix
patch=1,EE,21245d47,extended,21245f57

If you wanted to do the same thing but not bother with groups, just remove the "Cheats\" or "Patches\" so you are left with [No Money Cheat], for example, and this will just create a header in the patch interface. All patches will be treated like this without automatic activation and the user will need to select what cheats they want to enable. Groups can be a couple of layers deep if required.

Fields such as "description" and "author" are optional, but will show in the interface.

No Interlace and Widescreen patches - Special conditions

For these patches, there are certain headers which are reserved for these, which then interact with the GLOBAL settings for Widescreen and No Interlace patches

for a widescreen patch, the new way to do these patches is:

Code:

[Widescreen 16:9]
gsaspectratio=16:9
patch=1,EE,21234253,extended,21234253

This header of [Widescreen 16:9] is REQUIRED for auto detection of widescreen patches. The new option above "gsaspectratio" allows you to specify the aspect ratio, at the moment the supported values are:

Stretch
Auto 4:3/3:2
4:3
16:9

Note: These values are CASE sensitive!

For a no interlacing patch, the new way to do these patches is:

Code:

[No-Interlacing]
description=Attempts to disable interlaced offset rendering.
gsinterlacemode=1
//Remove Interlacing
patch=1,EE,65432178,extended,00000000

This header of [No-Interlacing] is REQUIRED for auto detection of no interlacing patches. The new option above is "gsinterlacemode" which in this case is being set to 1 for "None". For further options please consult the GameDB readme under GS Hardware General Fixes here: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/blob/mast...eral-fixes

For all other patches, they will need to be enabled manually by the user in the per-game settings under the new patching interface, we hope you like it!

Final note: New Filenames!

With the new changes you can now also call the files SERIAL_CRC.pnach, so for example SLES-12345_ABCD1234.pnach, this will make sure there are no collisions with other game CRC's, so will be encouraged going forward! I will also in future try to update our existing distributed patches to have this system, as much as possible, but any help is welcome

If you wish to submit new patches to be distributed, or update existing patches with fixes, you can do so on our patches repo, we don't how ever take requests to fix them, that needs to be done on the specific threads in this forum, since it is a community effort.

Patches Repo: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2_patches