The microfiche is basicly just black printed on transparent film, since this is a hobbyproject (I assume?!), it's money rather than time that's the hurdle, or?
Shouldn't it be feasible to scan them in a good scanner (which is basicly all modern scanners, i.e. quite cheap) with a white background paper, as jpeg's directly into your computer. Scanning each image as a separate picture should work, timeconsuming yes, but what the heck...
I have some microfiches somewhere, if I can find them I can try doing this as a test, if you don't have the equipment and don't want to buy something just for experimenting.
Cheers,
Mac