I have been playing around with various Chinese pirate games for the NES and have decided to try my hand at hacking one of them. One of the obvious steps would involve hacking the text display engine to use an 8x8 font rather than the 16x16 font that a majority of the games use. Unless the coders went out of their way to make the game friendly to hackers, I presume this is going to require assembly level hacking.

At the moment, I have absolutely no experience with assembly language and my only experience with debugging was in randomly clicking around in FCEUX's debugger, trying to figure out what things did. Would I be correct in assuming that familiarizing myself with debugging in general would be useful prior to immersing myself in assembly language? If so, are Parasyte's FCEUd tutorials a good place to start with this?

Any suggestions on what to focus on in this regard would be greatly appreciated.