I came up with these ideas on a short walk;
Automatic spinning and zooming on environments in game depending on character position.
No as the game does not use 3d backgrounds and objects. It has 3d objects in multiple 2d planes instead. (IE boxes trains anything that moves) It would also require the engine itself be changed. That is not likely to happen since it would be easier to make a whole new game in reality.
Screen change effects.(eg.Quick Fade In/Out, Zoom, Dirge)
See above comment about the amount of work.
Menu and text/dialouge box skinning.
Think you could add these to the settings and/or In-game options menu?
Not in a million years, because it's part of the engine, you would have to not only change the scripting system to add these features you would have to change the game engine as well. Patching can only rectify
existing code and then it is a limited amount of changes as this is basically altering the code.
It is much better to make a whole new engine and modify the heck out of the script system. Changed scripting is of course is illegal to distribute. So you would have to do an in place translation then hope and pray it works. It might be easier to take the original disks and create a large install system that essentially installs the data by copying and patching the original content. Again that is on the shadey side of legality.
Cyb