Ran with David, bridge circuit. He talked about the
ROM hacking he's been doing on Super Mario World with the level editor Lunar Magic. He'd had some frustration recently with some bug in his program or the editor. His goal is to create a whole new (modified) game and invite his friends over to play it.
References:
From Rule-Breaking to ROM-Hacking: Theorizing the Computer Game-as-Commodity by Will Jordan, UCI, 2007. Apparently David is the proletariat of the information age, engaged in an epic class struggle.
Legality of ROM Hacking. I think there are lots of parallels here to the posting-of-maps flap.
I find one source (WikiAnswers) saying ROM hacks are illegal to redistribute as they are a "derivative work".
Wikipedia says that hacks are released as a patch that can be applied to the unmodified ROM, which is supposed to get around the legal issue. "The use of patches does not eliminate copyright issues because the patches may be considered derivative works; however, corporations generally ignore them as long as they are not distributed with the ROMs."
White paper on video game emulation, 2004.
I think it's cool David figured out how to do this. Apparently his self-training included watching youtube videos.