Thank you for the wishes, everyone! It means alot. Tryphon is doing a great job with the tools he made. Hiei has been his primary beta-tester, and the results are terrific! Once all the bugs are found, I'm sure he will release it and be exalted deservedly Once I really settle in, the translation should go much faster compared to GEN1, since I won't have to do the encoding by hand.
As for the game saves, if they are in the memory card format, they are interchangeble between the different games. The emulator save states don't work between different hacksaves. For example, if I make a save state with my hack, go and edit something like an item name, remake the ISO and try to load the save state, it won't work because of the checksum issue mentioned before. However, the in-game save doesn't care, which is a good thing!