The reason XBOX Emulators run homebrew games is that Homebrew games are far far simpler than 'real' games. They use only a fraction of the commands and operations that the real games do, and that's why they run well on early-development emulators.
It's also a great development curve: people make homebrew games, and if they don't work, the team reviews the game source code to check where it crashes, makes notes based on it as an effort to fix it, and if still the failure the emulator's fault, the emulator developers add support for operations and/or fix the emulator so it runs the game.
The process repeats itself until the emulator becomes perfect.
And yeah, hexadecimal isn't too difficult to grasp.
Where we, the humans, count from 1 to 10 and repeat (this is the DECIMAL system), computers understand only binary, which is always either 0 or 1. These are bits.
8 bits is one byte.
Let them all be 0, it would be 00000000. It represents the value of 0.
One bit to the end, and it'll be 00000001. It represents the value of 1.
Add one bit again, and it'll be 00000011. This represents 3. Why? Because we forgot 00000010. Bytes go through every single combination of bits. The full byte, which is 11111111, is 255.
And because typing all these 1s and 0s would be trivial as hell, we can compile them into the HEXADECIMAL system.
Binary * Hex * Decimal
0000 = 0x0 = 0
0001 = 0x1 = 1
0010 = 0x2 = 2
0011 = 0x3 = 3
0100 = 0x4 = 4
0101 = 0x5 = 5
0110 = 0x6 = 6
0111 = 0x7 = 7
1000 = 0x8 = 8
1001 = 0x9 = 9
1010 = 0xA = 10
1011 = 0xB = 11
1100 = 0xC = 12
1101 = 0xD = 13
1110 = 0xE = 14
1111 = 0xF = 15
So if something is 100 in decimal, the system WE use, it's 0x64 in hexadecimal.
You can experiment around by typing into Google search "what is 132 in hexadecimal" and it'll answer. Same goes for "what is 0xF2 in decimal", or even "what is 0x12 in binary"
Fool around and read Wikipedia. It helps. At least, it helped me.
EDIT: Good news! I found someone who can code in Python to help me develop a tool to extract the files out of the ROFs. Expect results in a day or few!