patches?
 

Can soneone explain what they are for etc

Hi there Conno, when games manuf decided to upset us making backups of their games, they started to put special code on the disk. So when you make a copy this code does not get copied over just a space where it should be.
Most CD/RW's see it as a bad sector.

The patch simply replaces the bad code for good code. Some patches add cheats and conversions to NTSC/PAL at the boot sequence also