InVerse, Darkdata, Vanya,
Thanks for the thoughts. 
Right now I'm learning to use FCEUX's debugging features to track down data to make an easytype patch (the one I said I wouldn't do, but progress encourages me), which is also preparing me to use Dwedit's input to help me to mod the dialog text engine.  I think it currently implements dual-tile loading so that English characters are padded from 8x8 to 8x16 (using a blank tile) to match the height of Chinese characters.  I aim to make it single-tile load, so I can fit 3 or 4 lines into a window, but may cost my ability to load 16x16 icons from the Chinese tilespace.  I only have a limited number of spare 8x8 tiles left to use, but the possibilities with the extended tilespace are enormous.  This is gonna be a risky and tricky job.  I need to find out if using 4-line dialog will corrupt the text engine in menus and battle, where I will need those 16x16 icons.  With those icons I can either use the icons sampled above, or scrunched-text icons.  I probably won't make a verdict until I've made those changes. 
As far as Icons vs Scrunch vs Trunc goes, Icons is in the lead.  Icons (16x16) vs Scrunch (24x16) both employ 16x16 icons which takes care of the display bug when a command appears over MaxHP.  Trunc, the last resort, is if 4-line text works but ruins everything else, which I wouldn't settle for unless I was evil. 
My imagination is starting to get ambitious, but first I have to see what I can do...

I'm really getting the hang of assembly hacking, but it's frustrating as hell. In order to insert code there's an elegant song & dance to do:

That's no big deal as long as I can find free memory.  The horsekick comes when my new code needs to use bank-switching to pull a value from another location, and instead pull the rug out from under myself by bank-switching the code I'm running! 


Why must it be so hard to find a safe free memory block?

(12:30PM)
Never mind, I've found a workaround that obviates the need for bank-switching.  The next patch is going to be awesome, you'll see...

(12:00AM)
Efforts in assembly are paying off in bulk. The backslash is never used, so I blanked out the tile and taught the text reader to treat it essentially as a new-line character.  Not only is this more memory-efficient than the system of dashes and padding-spaces I've been using before, it looks much better!  Making sure to cash in on this good fortune I've restored most (but not all) of the text I omitted for these space constraints.  I've backed up my work, cuz the next step looks harder -- 4-line text.

Was there already 8x16 ASCII support?

I looked at the FFL3 pirate (more than likely done by the same company), and it already had 8x16 ASCII characters in addition to 16x16 Chinese characters.
I started to hack in 8x8 support. But it looks like my plan of just hacking in the US text won't work, as there's many more items in shops. Don't know if there's anybody interested in translation support?
(sorry to derail)

It was a hell of a challenge, but I believe I have 4-line text in working order!  By this weekend I'd like to let all ye faithful audit a new patch.  It will contain the improved text engine, improved equipment names, some restored text, partial fixing of animated backgrounds, and even gameplay rebalancing.   :angel:
Also, most lines start with a 4-byte avatar header.  I was easily able to retune them to use 2-bytes, so memory is becoming less and less of an issue.  Still deciding about putting in the time to fix the battle graphics bug, which is just a matter of economizing the PPU.  Best case, all I'd have to do is omit a bitshift.

Edit - It was kind of a busy weekend.  Relax, I haven't forgotten the people heroically waiting for this patch.
Edit - Current delays are due to a bug found in the revised text engine at certain parts of the game.

Oh wow, first I heard of this game was today. How could I have been missing something this awesome for this long? I would LOVE to see this in English.

I haven't read up on everything yet but I'm wondering: when doing this "translation", are you actually translating from the language in this pirate version or are you just copying English out of the PS1 or PC official games? Either way, if it basically makes sense, do it! And I look forward to getting my greedy little hands on the finished product

Nerd42 ,
Nestopia and FCEU support the NANJING mapper, but not much else does, though I don't know any portable emulators that can.  I read that someone got it to work as a GBA ROM, and it's possible a portable GBA emulator could do the trick:
Baidu (Google Translated)
DWEdit
As for the translation, to answer your question, 85% of the game's text is copied from transcripts of the North American release of the PSX game.  That saved a lot of unnecessary translation work, but I still had to do some of my own translation and improvisation. 
As I said in the other thread, the next patch is delayed while I debug the revised text engine.

If it freshens your day, here's a raw FF7NES world map I've created.

"Cheat" is not in my vocabulary.  I could change the initial inventory to 20 and haggle down the store price.

I remember that error page.  IE sucks FF's balls.  I keep IE as a secondary browser for these things. 
If I recall, they only give you the Chinese GBA file (if it's still there), and not the patcher to make the NES into a GBA.  Fret not, for I hypothesize that the entire NES ROM should exist inside the GBA unbroken.  I took a quick peek inside the GBA file and found that it exists at 0x30910.  In theory you can take a patched version of the NES file, remove the 16-byte header to leave you with the ROM, and copy it directly onto the GBA at 0x30910.  Caveat: I've run the GBA in VisualBoyAdvance, and the emulation was terrible (did you have the same experience?).  Still, I'm curious on what a portable GBA emulator can do.

It will be the exact same size.  The memory issues I mentioned were not about file size, but bank size.  The dialog is broken into 32kB memory banks, so after I translate I have to make sure that the data fits properly into its own bank.  That's not much of a problem now, except for the bank that stores text AND animated BG graphics.