How to play The Adventures of Major Havoc on Mac

Game summary

Major Havoc is an upright cabinet vector-based arcade game made by Atari in 1983. The player controlled the titular character, Major Rex Havoc, first in the "shoot-'em-up" style game, in which the player operated Major Havoc's spaceship, the Catastrofighter, against the numerous robot ships who defend the enemy reactors. The ships are encased in a sort of "buckyball" force-field shield which must be shot first before the ship can be killed. In the next phase, the player would land on the robot space-station by centering the Catastrofighter in between the moving white line and Major Havoc would exit his ship and enter the space-station. The roller-knob controlled left and right character movement and a "jump" button permitted the player's character to leap over obstacles. Thus, a minor amount of "gravity" interacted with the player. The object was to get to the core of the space-station unmolested and sabotage the reactor. Once the charge was set, the player had to get out, back into the space-ship and MSD (minimum safe distance) before the space-station went critical and exploded. Red arrows lead the players direction in and the word out, also in red, points the direction out. The "mazes" get gradually more complicated to navigate in difficulty as the player progresses. Upon a successful mission, the next space-station became more difficult and the time allotted (both in and out) was accelerated.
First released: Dec 1983

Play The Adventures of Major Havoc on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play The Adventures of Major Havoc on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

The Adventures of Major Havoc installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install The Adventures of Major Havoc like you would on any PC.
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