If you have to take care of school, that's cool, too, and you should do it. Why? Because that's what's going to feed and clothe and shelter you in the future!

After that? Seriously, just plunge into it! First of all, things will go horribly wrong in the most imaginative ways possible! You can't make a plan and pull it through without having hands-on experience beforehand. Do some simple edits you want to incorporate into your hack before you screw up your hack you hacked for so many months without backups and which is gone after your last hack. Just try step by step inching towards the goal here. Do some edits on other roms and see if it works and when you have enough experience in some things, incorporate them into your hack.
Seriously, it's been only two weeks ago that I wished I had made a backup before this happened: "Funny... Can't remember coding that, code is probably not used, delete it for eternity! ... ... . . . Oh crap! Ctrl + Z... Doesn't work. Shit $#%&%{*@}!!!!!"

cYa,

Tauwasser

How's that an asset? You would have to dump the whole ingame scripting as well since it's one of the few games where text is not accessed via a global text storage but rather is spread across the whole rom compiled right into place where it was needed.

I mean, you already can do it. You just have to read some docs and then you can at least dump everything going on on every map, however, that's not really doing a hack. Ususually you would want to blank the old stuff out and just start from scratch. Less headaches that way.

cYa,

Tauwasser