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I'm not sure rom hackers and people who can entirely dissassemble a rom always overlap. You don't need full knowledge of assembly or your target system's archi

I'm not sure rom hackers and people who can entirely dissassemble a rom always overlap. You don't need full knowledge of assembly or your target system's architecture to open a rom in a hex editor and play with some values. The skills and tools needed to dissassemble a rom, reprogram it and recompile it are a bit more involved. Saying, nobody should bother hacking roms unless they have the skills to dissassemble and recompile the game is going to discount a lot of the people that have brought the state of rom hacking and modification to what it is today.

milesvp 6y ago
Yeah, while I agree with the parent about taking the time to disassemble a rom for larger projects, I feel he may be ignoring how low a barrier to entry it is to just modify some hex values and see them effect the rom you’re playing. It used to be a common first thing budding programmers did was write trainers for games, which often amounted to little more than changing a hex value from 0x03 to 0xff. Now you have 255 lives instead of the stock 3! Very heady stuff for someone in grade school, especially if those 3 lives cost a quarter in the arcade. There are a lot of people out there with little computer chops who would get a real thrill just replacing some of the sprites in their favorite game too.