Starting hacking anew

I need to start from square one (you guys probably saw that pun coming ), I want to learn hacking, I want to become decently familiar with 65816 Assembly because I believe that by doing so, I will have an advantage or at least, a deeper understanding on how languages in general work when I delve further into my computer science degree.

While I know what bytes, offsets and pointers are (and how binary and hexadecimal work), that's only the tip of the iceberg, and I crave more knowledge.

I did notice that ASM book for the 65816 CPU, and I think I remember someone pointing out that chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 are the ones I need to focus on, but I'm not 100% sure.

But this time, I'm serious. I want to learn, and while it will be painful (since ASM is one of the not-so-pretty languages for someone to learn), it will still be useful for someone like me to learn.

What kind of ROM hacking I want to learn out of this:

-Text hacking for now, since it's probably the least difficult hacking to start with out of all other difficult aspects of ROM hacking.
- After that, probably music hacking, but that is known to be extremely time-consuming and games are very picky about what's assigned to what.

I wish I got into that stuff when I was younger, but I never really knew anything about it and nobody tried to persuade me. I'm gonna stick what I know for now, but I wish you good luck.

What kind of ROM hacking I want to learn out of this:

-Text hacking for now, since it's probably the least difficult hacking to start with out of all other difficult aspects of ROM hacking.
- After that, probably music hacking, but that is known to be extremely time-consuming and games are very picky about what's assigned to what.

It's only a suggestion but you should tackle ASM right away. It's where you will learn the most and you can apply that knowledge to other games after. Here's 2 good references:

http://www14.brinkster.com/assassin17/thegun.htm
http://www.defence-force.org/computing/o.../annexe_2/

Events are quite fun too. As for text hacking, anyone can use a table and change text, you won't learn much but if it's your thing go for it. Music hacking is very time consuming. MML song import is another alternative, you should google that in the japanese web.

I wish I got into that stuff when I was younger, but I never really knew anything about it and nobody tried to persuade me. I'm gonna stick what I know for now, but I wish you good luck.

Thanks! I hope that sometime soon I'll figure out where I really need to begin (aside from what I mentioned, that is).