Thanks for noting my project here :-) I discovered this forum through YouTube's analytics feature on my video.
Yeah, the discussion regarding this patch goes on mostly
at Romhacking.net. If you are having problems with the patch, I suggest you post a report there. That way, the discussion that begins from your post will benefit a larger audience. But at least until I forget to, I will check posts here as well.
For the record, the proper USA Castlevania II NES ROM to patch has the CRC32 sum of A9C2C503. A CRC32 of BA319CBD also is in distribution and is acceptable. If you use the BPS patch format and
Beat for patching, you will get a notification from the program whether the patch was applied successfully and to the right file or not.
Since the last post quoted by Inccubus, I have changed the font and done some other minor changes. The current release version as of this post is 2.2.1. You can find always it at:
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/cv2fin/ .
Regarding the translation space (MathUser's post, #119624): For the most part the increased space I added for the dialog was more than enough to accommodate accurate and fluent translations. There were some situations that were difficult. If you encounter dialog that you feel is stilted or otherwise illfitting (possibly by
reading the dissection page), please feel free to tell me, and I'll see if I can help it.
My primary project was the Finnish-language* translation of this game; I only added the English one as a moment's inspiration after someone's specific request at YouTube, and it might still use improving. English just doesn't happen to be my native language.
Regarding the appearance of the map, sorry, I don't know what a SOTN/Metroid-vania style map looks like. I used the official map from the Japanese manual, with a few edits to make it more suitable for NES rendering. If you mean a map where each "room" is represented as a square / rectangle... The problem is that Castlevania II world layout is awfully horizontal. It wouldn't make a cool map in my opinion.
Changing the music / adding new music is theoretically possible: There is an abundance of free space in the ROM, so no expansion is needed. It's just that I have not quite reverse-engineered the music engine yet, and even if I had done so, it is not trivial to arrange music -- for the NES, for a particular engine, or otherwise.
Related topic: Changing the engine to support new channels added by the VRC6 chip (which would practically only benefit emulator players anyway) without sacrificing its existing features might be a huge undertaking on its own.
Some screenshots:
*) Yes, the language is called FiNNish. "Finish" is an English word that means something completely different.