Major Havoc Level Editor

The Major Havoc Level Editor will allow you to create mazes and play them one at a time in MAME.

The purpose of this Level Editor is twofold. Once it is complete, there will be a contest for 8 Levels to be included in an extension of the original ROM's. Owen Rubin has tentatively agreed to work on it with me so we can do a few fun things plus implement a homeworld maze. It will be a large project but this level editor is the first step. In the end, the second goal for me to make this tool fancy enough so people can make their own ROM'sets and play them in their game.

Here is what the Level Editor will not yet do...

• Build entire maze collections and run them as new levels in the existing game of Major Havoc
• Run without bugs and oddities!

News about the level editor are in the readme below or posted at The CoinOpSpace Major Havoc Forum

Welcome to my little experiment... dreams come slow in life sometime but this is a step in the right direction. My story with Major Havoc began in 1983 at the wonderful arcade called 'Playland' in State College, PA. I remember when the Major Havoc game arrived in it's Atari box and sat in the corner waiting for Gene Steele to unpack it. Alas, he was on task and had it up and running. I was only 13 so I couldn't make it nearly as far into the game as the older kids and it was amazing when someone actually made it to the upper levels (13+).

I was working at a local electronics shop about 2 years later when games such as Major Havoc and were falling out of value and they were typically sitting in backrooms, waiting to be converted. My friend Bryan Roth and myself saved up our money and bought a Major Havoc PCB from M&P Amusements in York, PA. We quickly make a conversion harness and had it up and running in his Star Wars cabinet with a Whirly-Gig from a tempest. Since this was not a conversion board, it was quite difficult to get far into the game. I decided that I would attempt to hack the ROM to give us unlimited lives so we could find the 'Homeworld' that is promised in the game. After some disassembly of the ROM's using a Commodore 64 and a PROMQueen EPROM programmer, I had a nice hex dump of every ROM in the game. I quickly sat down with pen paper and the 6502 opcodes and started decoding from the RESET vector. Remarkably after about 1 month, I had found the lives per game lookup table and modified it to give 0x7F lives per game (127 in decimal) :-). Bryan and I stayed up all night playing beyond level 20 into the random colored mazes. We gave up after level 48 and decided that there must not be a homeworld.

That little drawback didn't seem to stop me for some reason... I continued decoding the ROM's on a 386 PC using Wordstar for the next summer. I even called Atari and spoke to Ed Logg about using Major Havoc as a project in school to show how games are programmed if they would just send me the source code for a demonstration of a compiler... well, he didn't go for it unfortunately, so it was back to Wordstar.

About 5 years later (1993) I had started my own Electronics Repair shop in Laramie, WY and I seemed to be accumulating games in my storage area (It didn't help that I was located next to the local vending company and fixed their games for them). I kept disassembling and documenting the ROM's routine by routine late into the nights. At this point RGVAC was growing fairly quickly and there was a small group of very technical people getting into the 'collecting' hobby. People were just discovering that games such as Major Havoc and I,Robot actually existed and they started being discussed on the internet. I had learned enough about Major Havoc at this point to release 'Return to Vaxxx' on RGVAC around 1995. It had a few new mazes and support for speech but I had done this strictly via hacking the hex in the ROMS, it was pretty messy. Through this time, I eventually found out that Owen Rubin had developed Major Havoc and a friend from RGVAC (Al Kossow) actually knew how to contact Owen. I think at that point Owen must have felt sorry for me spending all this fanatical time on Major Havoc, but he spent time explaining how the code worked and some facts about some of the routines and structures in the code. Eventualy, through some massive help from Owen and Al Kossow, I had a fully dissassembled and compilable version of Major Havoc (with comments even!). I created a compiler that even worked like the original Macro assembler used at Atari.

In 2004, I started making the Level Editor using the .NET Framework 1.0. It has been a project that I worked on during plane trips for the last 5 years. You might say that most of this was developed above 30,000 feet. Around 2005 I spoke to Owen about working on a final version that included a Homeworld but both of our schedules were quite busy.

After the Owen Rubin Chat on the CoinOpSpace Site in February 2009, I brought up the topic of doing a final version again since I had something compilable now and Owen was game. I though that the Level Editor would be a great way to allow the collector community to submit their favorite mazes and then have Owen pick out 8 of his favorites (2 of each maze style) and then we would make a final version of Major Havoc that included the original mazes, 8 new mazes, a homeworld, the Star Castle wave, Speech and other fun stuff (lots of tricks and easter eggs aimed at the home collector player). So, that I where we sit now. If I can get this editor complete this summer, we will start taking submissions for the maze contest and go from there. Using Visual Studio, ANKHSvn (Subversion plugin for VS) and Subversion, we should be able to develop something with him in California and me in Wyoming. We will see how it goes.... keep watching!!!!

If you have troubles getting the installer to work please initially download the .NET Framework 2.0