Want to play on my SNES Mini again and have some questions. Also want to include SD3, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma.
I heard the latest version of hakchi has a built in rom patching tool. Is it fine or should I better use an external patcher?
First, two valuable resources:
Canoe compatibility list with patches
SNES mini compatibility list
Either way, you probably want to get
DarkAkuma's SFROM tool. hakchi CE has a way to integrate the tool so that it patches games when you add them. If you want this functionality, put the contents of the .rar file into hakchi's sfrom_tool folder. Add the patches from DarkAkuma's site and the
patch pack from Robin64's site to the sfrom_tool/patches folder (
not hakchi CE/patches). Once that's done, load up the sfrom tool and press F4 so it updates its patch database, then close it. Open hakchi CE, click on Tools > SFROM Tool > Enable and it'll automatically patch games that need it.
However, the implementation in hakchi isn't perfect. It should work fine for games like Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, but I know for a fact that it doesn't work great for a game like Star Ocean. For games like these which also need a translation patch, it's better to run the SFROM Tool on its own, load the rom into the tool, and click on the "add .ips patch" button to add the translation patch. It'll create an .sfrom file which you can then add to hakchi.
For Seiken Densetsu 3, I patched that game before I really understood how the SFROM Tool actually worked, so I did it all manually using Lunar IPS. I don't know how well that one works with the SFROM Tool. When I did it manually, I had to add a header to my untranslated rom, apply the translation patch with LunarIPS, remove the header, then apply the Canoe fix patch. Then I added it to hakchi, followed by adding the preset ID to the game (found in the first spreadsheet), which you do by clicking on the game and pressing ctrl+alt+E. It's 1610 if you're not using the SFROM Tool integrated into hakchi, and 1016 if you are.
Hope that helps!