I recently bought myself a super treat. The first console I’ve ever played, the “Magnavox Odyssey2”, widely known in Brazil simply as the “Odyssey”. I hadn’t played it in decades! The emulator that exists is a little weird to use if you are not very familiar with the system, not to mention that you don’t have the manuals which are very important to the experience. So it was amazing to play it all again. It brought back so many memories. It’s even A/V modded so the image is amazing on my CRT tvs.

O2 games are fairly simple. I had a notion that the console was better than the Atari 2600, which it isn’t, generally speaking. It has some advantages, but overall the Atari wins. One thing it has going for it is very obvious: an alphanumeric keyboard. You can write your name on the screen, how cool is that?

There’s something else that stood out though. There was a series of pac-man clone games called “K.C. Munchkin!” and “K.C.’s Krazy Chase!” that were released locally as “Come-Come II” and “Come-Come” (translates as “eat-eat”). The games were so popular here that to this day there are still people who call pac-man “come-come”.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these two games is that they had a complete level editor built-in. This was huge in the very early 80’s. Granted, the editor had a very difficult to use interface, but nonetheless you could edit a working level for a videogame, and I wouldn’t see that again until the NES many years later with Lode Runner and Excitebike.

Another favorite game of mine on the Odyssey was “Pick Axe Pete”, which was localized as “Didi na Mina Encantada”. Didi is a very famous comedian around here. I didn’t remember much about this game, and it’s one of those games that I couln’t get to work on the O2em emulator. This was probably the first videogame I’ve ever played because it was “Didi”.

Well, after playing many O2 games again I can say my favorite is Pick Axe Pete. The game is really fun. There are so many details on how the game works that make achieving a high score very strategic.

The game features 10 built-in levels, but unlike Come-Come it doesn’t feature a level editor. I have been playing the game and I thought some of the levels could make better use of the game’s strategic elements. So I decided to see if I could edit the levels in the game’s ROM. I know nothing about Intel’s 8048 processor assembly language, but looking at the ROM file in a hex editor I noticed a section of “FF” and “FE” that stood out as probably being data bits. And it was. So I decided to take my WIP NES Assets Workshop project and adapt as a Pick Axe Pete editor, which I could do very quickly.

In the editor you load a ROM and it tells you which game version it is. Then you can zoom in/out on the interface, and draw lines on the level by click/dragging on the grid area. You can also select a level to edit using the numbers on your keyboard, and then save as a different file.

When saving it keeps the same CRC32 hash by editing a section of unused zeroes in the ROM so that O2em can still recognize which game it is. This was a hassle to achieve and I had to resort to help from the community, especially Catan from GMS2 forums, who actually provided a working script to do that calculation.

I realize this is a very niche thing, but that’s the beauty of fan projects, they enable stuff like this to happen. Anyway, if you’re one of those people who still care about the Odyssey2 you may want to give this editor a go. It is only for Windows and there’s no installer, just unzip the files into a folder first, as it won’t run directly from the zip.