Many of these, such as IPSXP, LunarMagic, WinXP and BulkIPS, are also freely available on Zophar's Domain or .Īnd that's pretty much all there is to it. There are special 'patcher' programs that will apply the patch you choose to the ROM you select, turning your ROM into the hack that you want to play. Each patch contains only the differences between the original ROM and the hacker's version, which theoretically makes them 'derivative works' and therefore legal to distribute (it is NOT legal to distribute ROMs, whether they have been hacked or not). ROM-hacks are usually distributed as 'patches' like the ones hosted here that can be applied to a normal ROM to transform it into the hacked version. Many good emulators, such as Nestopia, VirtuaNES, FCEUX, or ZSNES and SNES9X, are freely available on Zophar's Domain (Another excellent, multisystem emulator is Bizhawk, which can be found by visiting. Hacked ROMs (or just 'hacks') usually require an emulator to play, which is a computer program that mimics the hardware of a game system. This means that they can take old games like Rockman 1-6 and make their own brand-new versions of them.

People who hack ROMS alter the data from a ROM image to produce their own 'versions' of the ROM or game they hack.

A ROM image (or simply, a ROM), is a copy of the data from the Read-Only Memory chip in a video game, the basic stuff that tells the system what game is there, how it runs, etc.

How to play rom hacks