Help:Game Patches

Help page
Revision as of 19:18, 16 October 2020 by HerrHulaHoop (talk | contribs) (Removed SPU from main page as the SPU page will store the patch now)

This page aims to provide all information relating to RPCS3's patch system.

  • the Main subpage lists the current PPU patches available for RPCS3's game patching system.
  • the SPU subpage lists the general-use SPU patches available for RPCS3's game patching system.
  • the Canary subpage lists patches that are severely buggy, in-development, or circumvent emulation bugs. These patches are not shipped with RPCS3's patch download functionality.

Using game patches

The simplest way to enables patches in RPCS3 is as follows:

  1. Boot RPCS3
  2. Select Manage > Game Patches to access the Patch Manager.
  3. Click the Download latest patches button and the emulator will automatically fetch the latest version of available patches.
  4. Navigate to the patch you wish to enable and tick the checkbox corresponding to the patch. You may want to tick the check box Only show owned games to make navigation simpler.
  5. Click Save and boot the game.

Manually adding custom patches

There are many patches that aren't shipped with the automatic download facility due to them being canary patches, privately-shared patches, or otherwise missing from the Wiki. These patches can be added to RPCS3 in the following manner:

  1. Open your preferred text editor (e.g: VSCode, Sublime, Notepad++).
  2. Add the line Version: 1.2 to the top of the file. Do not paste anything else on this line. Hit Enter and move to the next line.
  3. Paste your custom patch that from the Canary page or any other source. Ensure that the formatting for these patches are perfect, as the emulator will ignore the patch if it detects any formatting deficiencies.
  4. Click Save and name the file imported_patch.yml. Do NOT change the capitalization or use any other name, RPCS3 will not be able to apply the patches.
  5. Save the file in relevant location:
    Windows: \patches\
    Linux: ~/.config/rpcs3/patches/
  6. Navigate to the Patch Manager as mentioned before and tick the checkbox corresponding to the patch you wish to apply.

How to identify the PPU/SPU executable hash

This section is meant for adept users who wish to apply a patch to a different game version. Do not try to edit any of the patches unless you know what you are doing. Please note that you will also have to edit the Title ID and game version information for the modified patch to be applied by the emulator.

To identify the executable hash, follow the instructions mentioned here:

  1. Boot the game for a minute and then close the emulator.
  2. Open RPCS3.log (or just RPCS3 with the Notepad icon).
  3. Search for the string PPU executable hash:.
  4. Copy the value that looks like PPU-b8c34f774adb367761706a7f685d4f8d9d355426. This is the PPU hash of your game.
  5. Open patch.yml with any text editor (e.g: VSCode, Sublime, Notepad++).
  6. Find the existing patch that you wish to modify and copy it to imported_patch.yml. Ensure that you also copy over any anchors that the patch relies on.
  7. Find the existing PPU hash in the patch and replace the same with the PPU hash you obtained in Step 4.

Please note that some games may have multiple PPU executable hashes, and it is up to you to figure out the correct hash to be copied. Also, the same method can be used to extract SPU executable hashes by searching for SPU executable hash: in Step 3.