Thanks for the encouragement!  I'm going to try and keep posting progress to stay motivated, but don't want to spam like crazy, so if anyone wants to follow things more closely, I've got a Twitter account.

Current issues: My font still looks like shite (but it's working for now, if and when I actually get some SERIOUS translation progress done, I might see if I can get someone else to make a good font for me), and the NAMES are going to be tricky. I'm thinking of abandoning the Japanese name conventions and referring to the girls by first name, which will save a lot of space while also seeming more natural to Westerners. (Except for Rei, referring to other GUYS by last name is fairly common practice, and the reversal there in Rei's ending can seem a bit meaningful).   Those girls have some pretty long last names packed into 2 (or MAYBE 3) kanji, and at least in the "selection menu" areas where you can pick which ending to view or who you're going to invite to New Year's, etc., there's not much space to work with.

Good news though, I think I've figured out some of the compression. The first part of the script is a few common characters like speech brackets followed by a big mob of hiragana in phonetic order, except the uncommon kana are replaced by VERY common kanji.  I tried replacing one of those kanji in this opening text block with a rare symbol, loaded the game and found that symbol popping up all over now in the kanji's place.

I now had some nice wishful thinking to test out - I listed out all those common symbols in order like I was making a new table.  I found the game-opening phrase "PURORO-GU kara hajimeru" in the script by searching for the uncompressed katakana. The kanji for the stem of "hajimeru" was also uncompressed. It was just the vowel-lengthening dash and the hiragana replaced by hex. I wrote down these hex and put them next to that list of opening characters and... the numbers were spaced up perfectly to make a new table.  I added this to my original table, made a new partial script dump, and suddenly there was a LOT less hex and a lot more readable dialogue!

I was worried there'd be some really complicated stuff involved in decompression, but since there's so many bloody kanji in Tokimeki and it takes 2 bytes to identify a character instead of just 1, just coming up with a shorthand 1-byte code for the most common 98 characters would definitely add up to a lot of saved space.  Now, the trick is going to be figuring out if I can compress my own text enough this way. Maybe I'll go ahead and finish the uncompressed stuff first while I think that over... I've heard there's ways around this compression stuff, but with Tokimeki being a fairly big game already, I don't want to go tinkering with it and stuffing it up too much by trying to add space or who knows what.

Glad to see this finally being worked on. I tried doing the PSX version at one point and while there was uncompressed text, my limited hacking skills stopped me from making any progress(As in I didn't have the ASM knowledge to turn 2 bit text to 1 bit text).

Just had to post again since I'm getting pretty excited by my current progress.  I've got a lot of menu things inserted, and last night I got a lot done in the phone book screen, and girl's profiles.  Best of all, I finally got the girl's NAMES to look okay! (at least in the menus... dialogue is another matter)

I might release my first bare-bones patch pretty soon if I can keep this up and get most of the basic skeleton of the game translated.  Next time I update my website, I'll be including my own font table and translation notes for at least the 2 main banks I've been working in.

That web page says you did this in Linux/Mac OS X... now that's a jaw-dropper! Helps to say that any platform is capable of trying to make a translation patch...

Ah yeah it's kind of goofy-looking as it's all squashed like. Still nice progress!

Goemon, Ebisumaru, Yanagiba, Yusuke, Tenchi...

The first two are from the Ganbare Goemon Series (Sorry, I thought of Konami for the first two), the third one is from Wedding Peach (at least the SFC video game), the fourth one is from Yu Yu Hakusho, the fifth one is kinda self-explanatory if you know the anime.

Ooh, that page is fun... and when I forgot to put it on male only, I got "Zelda" in my first try.   

If you're going the Konami route...

First Names:
Lance
Bill
Simon
Richter
Jake (Raiden)
Vic (Viper, but works as a first name)
Joe (Ashita no Joe)

Last Names:
Miller
Campbell
Hunter
Belmont
McDohl