Posting this here because I've lately slowed down the progress on this and hopefully showing it here might somewhat motivate me to finish it.
It's thing I started working on somewhere around last spring.
Other than graphics and level design, I'm looking into changing a few enemies around(which I'll definitely do, I'm just unsure how much I can change with this little knowledge of NES code) changing some music and hopefully making an alternate character mode via another patch(which hopefully wouldn't be a gfx change, but also have different main weapon and some subweapons)
Here are some pics, although a few might be outdated(specifically Stage 4).
(Red guy in the picture is the player character, stage pics are taken from Stake Editor since all stages aren't traversable atm)