A look into the ROM hack scene on NES

A portion of a Gamasutra interview with ROM hacker, 'Infidelity'

GS: What sorts of skills would someone interested in hacking ROMs need? Can anyone do it?

I: Can anyone do it? Absolutely. It all depends on that person’s determination and dedication to 6502. This is not something that anyone with zero experience can just jump into, and expect amazing results. There are a lot of boring and tedious things that go along with hacking a ROM. But the end result always pays off when you accomplish what you set out to do.

Skills needed, would be at least a little knowledge of 6502, how to do simple commands like load a value and store it, compare that value to a specific value, if it matches then have it branch to another piece of code, if it doesn’t match, to have that code just continue on to whatever else is going on.