Castlevania is an action platformer for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Known in Japan as Akumajou Dracula ("Demon Castle Dracula"), this game is about a clan of vampire hunters known as the Belmonts hunting down and killing Dracula himself.

You play as Simon Belmont, and fight your way through Dracula's castle (known in English as "Castlevania", a portmanteau of Castle and Transylvania, har har). You have many weapons at your disposal. Your main weapon, the Vampire Killer whip has somehow been passed down through the Belmont clan for generations. You can get power ups for that (essentially changing it from a leather whip, to a short chain, and longer chain whip). You also have many sub-weapons, which require hearts to use. These include a knife, throwing axe, holy water, cross boomerang and stopwatch (which freezes all enemies on screen). You can only throw one of these in a certain period of time, unless you get the "II" and "III" powerups.

This hack repurposes the life counter in Castlevania into a death counter. You begin the game with zero deaths, and each time you die the counter increases by 1 (up to 99). This effectively gives you infinite lives but more than just a simple cheat code, it also modifies the in-game UI to help players keep track of deaths and encourage trying to have as few deaths as possible.

[Changes]
- Repurposes the lives counter as a death counter.
- Death counter starts at 0.
- Dying increases the counter.
- Getting extra lives (either from points or the hidden 1up) plays the jingle but has no effect.
- Added a little skull icon to the UI to indicate deaths instead of lives.
- At 256 deaths the counter loops back to 99 to prevent a Game Over caused by an overflow.

Database match: Castlevania (USA) (Rev 1)
Database: No-Intro: Nintendo Entertainment System (v. 20210216-231042)
File SHA-1: 7A20C44F302FB2F1B7ADFFA6B619E3E1CAE7B546
File CRC32: 856114C8
ROM SHA-1: 3DCB69A8C861C041AEB56C04E39ADF6D332EDA3A
ROM CRC32: B668C7FC