So if you downloaded our recent release of CRW Metal Jacket, you’ll notice that the patching process is a little different from what you may be used to. It doesn’t even resemble the patching process we ended up making for E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution or Rusty either. Well, that’s because we decided to strip it down and make it as lean as possible to pass the savings onto you. But mostly just to make it compatible with as many computers as we could. The other thing we did was make the executable itself generic and take a configuration file as an input so that we wouldn’t have to build a new patcher for every single release.
Since this tool is helping us with our releases, we figured it might help others interested in the PC-98 to release their patches as well, so we cleaned it up and slapped a name on it, written some documentation for it, and now it’s available for you guys as an early beta version.
Oh, and we’re calling it Pachy98.
It does a lot of things automatically and streamlines the process of patching for users, which we’re still hoping to get some feedback for from users aside from my mom telling me that it’s very neat. To that end, we’re also removing the older patching process from E.V.O. and Rusty and upgrading them to Pachy98 releases as well. The older patchers are still there in the older versions, but we’re planning on using Pachy98 for all future releases now, so may as well make the rest of our work follow suit.
There is currently no support for Mac/Linux with Pachy98, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get around to it eventually! We’ll continue to release full disk patches for people that can’t use Pachy98 yet, never fear.
If you’re developing a translation and want to use Pachy98 to release a patch, that’s great! Check out the Pachy98 page for a bit more information as well as a link to some sample configuration files and the general source code for the tool itself.
Also, in a bit of extra news, we’ve added some full mission map rips from CRW Metal Jacket to the project page. If you liked the game and wanted to look at the maps without any fog of war or anything, this is for you! They are kind of a spoiler, so you’ll have to click the link to see them from inside of the project page, but they’re definitely pretty cool.