Making a backup creator

Question

I am helping develop a program that makes an easy way to backup a specific file format in the form of an ips patch. We want it to compare 2 files, one in the program folder with a specific name(for ease) and then another that's user selected, which will then produce a patch with the current date/time as the file name. We are coding in C. Are there any tips on to how we can manage this?

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this would be to find an existing IPS implementation in the form of either:

1. A pre-existing library plus API
2. A pre-existing project

Fortunately for you, Neill Corlett (the wonderful guy who made the English translation of "Secret of Mana 2" / "Seiken Densetsu 3" a reality) has already created an openly available implementiation of the UPS and IPS patch generation/application algorithms. Please refer to the associated readme file to determine the licensing terms.

Anyhow, you can just modify the main() function in the program to select two particular file names (his existing program is already designed to accept them as command-line arguments), and the work is passed off the the existing functions that handle patch generation/application.

Good luck!