Super Dimensional Fortress Macross: Eternal Lovesong
Year of Release: 1992
Developed by NCS
Published by Masaya
For Super CD-ROM² System

Macross (known as Robotech in states) is an anime which people either love or hate.I'm too lazy to tell the whole story of Macross, because most of you already know it. ;) Anyways, I loved the original anime, Macross 7 TV series and Macross+ , so that's why I chose this game as my current project. 

The game takes place after the first war with Boldozer (the first anime). Macross now uses the Lynn Minmay song attack against Macross' enemies. Now a new war breaks out with the Zentrandi and you play as the learning Valkyrie pilot Kiryuu and his friend Letrade, a happy-go-lucky female Valkyrie pilot. Macross: Eternal Lovesong is an excellent turn-based strategy game. Some people I've talked to hates this game from the bottom of their hearts, but I like the game, because it's not too hard and the music soundtrack is awesome. The soundtrack is played with the same instruments, which were used in the first anime, so the music sounds almost indetical to the original score. Because the anime was made in 1984, the music score has this nice 80's sound in it. Be sure to listen the sample MP3 ^^. The speech is fully in CD-DA, so no lousy ADPCM this time. This means that the speech sounds awesome and the seiyuu are great also.

Track info:

Track 1: The normal warning speech
Track 2: Data, 2 second pregap needed, contains everything
Tracks 3-46: CD-DA

Emulation info:

Hu-Go!: Crashes.
Magic Engine: Playable in both Windows and DOS.
HuDX/Hu6280: Dumped ISO of track 2: Playable.

Data track info:

Only one data track, which is rather small, only 4,4 megs. Graphics are compressed and so are the fonts. Speech, however is totally in CD-DA, but Hu-Go!'s subtitling-option would be a solution to this.
 

CD-DA info:

No physical audio tracks are used. The music sectors are written in the game code.

Current progress: 60% completed.

When I got this game, I was horrified: 45 audio tracks! I've never seen a PCE game before which has this much audio! I only hoped that the game would seek the audio tracks separately, but after the first burn, my hopes were squished: the audio was TOTALLY out of sync. The game played audio totally from different tracks than it should've had. For example, when the first mission's cut-scene began, the audio started from halfway of track 19 and the audio track of the cut-scene was 17. Even though I changed the postgaps, the audio position didn't change. I was pretty confused.... until I finally figured out the track system. After another burn, I saw my theory proved right: Macross didn't give a crap about physical tracks, it played the audio with straight "play audio XXXX...XXXXX" with the X's replaced with certain sectors. So the only thing how to get the music to play correctly is to adjust the whole CD-DA data on the CD to it's correct position with either pregaps or editing the INDEX commands of the CUE file. After 4 hours of CUE editing, I managed to get the game to play audio at least from the correct track. Now I only need to get the game to play the tracks all the way from the beginning. ^^