Finally sent the first part of the dumped game text from Itadaki Street 2 to a friend for translation this past weekend. Hopefully that means we can make more progress soon...!
In all honesty, I'll probably have to come up with a solution for the 8x8 text the game uses beyond just using the game's 8x8 font. There isn't enough room on screen for everything in a lot of places, like the HUD, menus, system dialogs, and so on. I don't know if there is enough free VRAM space for a variable-width small font, either.
For example, here's one of the screens that scares me the most, the stockbroker screen.
Character names are limited to 4 characters in the original game, and would be up to 9 in English, but need 2 rows even in Japanese; text for district names, max value/current value/current price, and column headers is already cramped; and there is very, very little room for expanding the window itself (1 tile left, into the overscan area), so I only have these confines to work in...
Even just the in-game HUD itself, that bottom-right window, is so cramped in the original that character names, the number of dokodemo/suit yourself cards they've collected, and the suits they've collected actually run together into an unbroken string of tiles, filling the entire width of the window. There is precious little space there, and absolutely no room for 5+ character names without some changes.
So after considering it for a while, I've realized there's only about 160 tiles, max, that I could use in VRAM for a dynamically-drawn 8x8 (or 8x4, in this case) set of text.
I don't know if that's enough tiles for text-heavy screens like the stockbroker screen, status screens, menus, etc...
I'm worried again that this project might end up being just barely not possible to do well, and we'll have to make some sacrifices...