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Ok it's pushed to git, I used the collection you posted as a test, good thing because there was 1 of the dat file containing garbage utf8 characters at the start which needed to be filtered out... Apparently it works now. The file selector which appears when choosing "preload ips dat files" now allows to select multiple files in a game directory (and it can't leave the ips directory), when you leave the game directory or close the file selector the corresponding config is saved in the ini file in the ips directory. This ini file is read when a game is loaded with a corresponding name. That's all there is to it, quite simple to sum up, but full of small annoyances when coding it. There is a hard limit of 20 ips files at max, the prog will complain if you try to go over that, but you would really want to push the limit to do it, your collection uses 11 ips files, and that's already quite something, and there is still some margin here ! Congratulations for finding this combination by the way, it's right that kof97 is much better with this ! I should improve the way it looks by displaying some description and maybe the picture while browsing the dat files, but I keep that for later... !

It will take longer than anticipated because I must start by adding a gui widget and it's been a long time since I did it for the last time, a little rusted here. By the way I even found a french dat file : 2-plus06.dat, it should be relatively understandable in english even without google ? They say this modification is major, contrary to most of the others which are very targeted, it probably explains why you can use many at the same time without problem, still lucky though, it means they don't use the trick of adding a jump and moving the code at the end of the rom, otherwise all the code of all the patches would happily overwrite each other at the end of the rom... ! Still crazy, but indeed this time there are more valuable approaches there.

It is always no guarantee that different ips can use together, especially the big hack. It is because it requires to add a very long instructions put into the rom. Most likely, hacker put these instructions at the end part of the rom file. To modify this, it requires some knowledge on 68k programming, and find out the jump instruction which jump to the long part of instructions. So, you can copy and paste the long instructions to other address and change the jump instruction accordingly.

Well you are lucky to be able to use these patches simultaneously, these are not simple plugins, these are patches, I mean if 2 patches you use happen to patch the same area, it's boum ! For now I didn't add any support to have more than 1 dat file at a time, but it shouldn't be too hard to do. Yeah the git repo is definitely low quality, it's not a super idea to put this in git to begin with because ips are binary files and even if git allows to put binary files, it shines for ascii files, here it looks like a waste of space. For your broken roulette patch, if I have to guess I'd say it was 8r-hcsjh2n.dat, replaced by 3-hchr2ps.dat... (names similar !). I'll try to add the possibility to make combinations of dat files later then.

The most broken dat file found so far is for double dragon, doubledrsp_20220717.dat its 1st ips references the code rom beyond its size, thanks to the new size limit for avoiding the crash and then the 2 following ips files in the dat file don't even have the same name as on disk, so they can't be found ! It's almost a shame to add some support for something which can be so broken... ! So don't worry if you have problems with all that, it was worth an experiment, but probably not worth loosing too much time on it. At least the code to add support for that is short, there won't be any problem with that !

Ok after a good break I finally decided to add some support for these dat out of curiosity (curiosity works well on me usually !). So it's some basic support, it works by preloading the dat file, a new command appears in the main menu when no game is loaded : preload ips dat file, it gives a file selector where you must choose the .dat file you want. Normally you should return to the main menu without message after that, you can load the real rom now. If the patches apply without error, you won't get any message, and then you can play normally. In my tests I found some dat files reference a rom file that I don't have, specifically for kof97 in the github repository kof97ae_20180212.dat and kof97ae_20200810.dat both reference a very big 232-v3.v3 rom. We have this rom, but not so big, our size is $400000 when they try to access it as far as $f00000, which created a very nice rom crash here. So I added some tests for the maximum size allowed, for now it just displays a message on the console and tries to patch what it can as long as it's not over limit. I have tested pacman (in Misc), it changes everything, but is not very interesting, I prefer the original version ! and puzzle bubble 3, there are changes alright, but it seems to force you in a duel against the computer (there is some kind of cheat in the menu of the game which selects the right choice before you can move !). Anyway at least it shows it works. The previous command to load an ips file is still here for the cases where you have just an ips file, it still has the same rules, applies only to the rom code on the fly. These dat files apply the ips files referenced at a super low level, just after the rom has been loaded but before any decoding could take place. I didn't try to put a super interface for that, because I didn't find a really interesting dat file yet. Maybe later, I am far from having tested everything, but I am at saturation now... ! So it doesn't try to extract any description from the dat file, you'll have to select your dat file yourself !

After a longer look, it's lacking more descriptions for sure ! It's in the spirit of bootlegs where sometimes you really wonder what the difference is... ! Found a few oddities like the sailormn ips which make the game crazily harder, oh well.... the kf2k5uni which does an update without telling what is in the update and it's not obvious... ! Except that a ton where I couldn't tell what the difference is actually ! I'd say for now it's not motivating at all to add more support for that, I'll try to have a look at the video though...