To see if I could do it and the answer, so far, has always been 'no, kinda'.

I've always been interested...nah, fascinated would be the better term. Fascinated. Always been fascinated of the concept of ROM Hacking in general ever since finding out that you could, in fact, emulate Contra on a 100Mhz PC using Nesticle back in 1998. Finding that ROM hacking was a thing for anything between stupid graphic editing of Mario with toilet humor to one of the first ROM translations in existence from fans (Final Fantasy V) set a whole lot of things in motion for me as someone in high school, at the time.

I later tracked down communities (Zophar's Domain, ZSNES and SNES9X forums, Acmlm's ROM Hack Domain, just to name a few) to see just how such things went and what I found, quite frankly, were people that knew a hell of a lot more than I did about anything. Considering I grew up in a small town community for a large portion of my life leading up until then, this was a dream for me, especially being able to share in such niche interests with a plethora of information at my disposal. It really was the highlight for me around the birth of Web 2.0 and I never really quit the interests since.

Though I've never taken the time to really ROM hack fully, myself, I have at least done my community dillegence. Feedback, moderating and administrating and just doing some hobbyist things such as music creation or level design. Neither of latter I find especially qualifying as things like Mario Paint and Mario Maker exist at the basic level, but I have spent a large amount of time with editors for a random variety of things. I just never had the capacity for coding things at a more base level and never was granted the competency to go a little bit more beyond that.

Instead, I ended up going the hardware route with computer technology in general rather than the software route. I can probably whip together some of the best rigs that money can buy with my bare hands but if you ever wanted me to code a Mario hack from scratch with assembly I would probably curl up into a ball on the floor and cry.

I will call a victory for being able to hold a conversation with those skilled enough to do such a thing, however. I have met some impressively intelligent people in my time over the last quarter century pursuing that interest, however niche it might be. Really goes to show that you can find people in just about every interest out there if you try, especially with the Internet being as open as it is anymore.