The classic CP/M game Ladder reverse engineered in Turbo Pascal.
This is a rewrite in Turbo Pascal of the classic CP/M game "Ladder", originally written by Yahoo Software (not Yahoo!).
Ladder is an ASCII character based platform arcade game similar to Donkey Kong. You travel through levels with platforms and ladders where rocks fall down from the top while you collect statues before reaching the exit.
Back in 1999 Stephen Ostermiller made a version of Ladder in Java. Later, Mats Engstrom of SmallRoomLabs started another version in of Ladder in golang. Between my own memories of playing the original game on a Kaypro, and Stephen Ostermiller's and Mats Engstrom's code, I was able to come up with this version.
This version will use the original LADCONF.COM configuration program and LADDER.DAT configuration file. Since this version is a Turbo Pascal program, the terminal configuration portion of LADCONF isn't used, though it still does set up the movement keys, sound and back chatter options.
You'd need Turbo Pascal, of course. You'll also need to edit LADCONST.PAS to set the cursor on and off sequences for your terminal. LADDER.PAS is the main part of the program. I've successfully compiled this on a 58K CP/M system, so available RAM isn't a particularly critical limitation.
Once you've compiled LADDER.COM, copy LADCONF.COM to the same user area. If you don't have a LADDER.DAT file, when you run LADDER the first time it'll automatically load LADCONF to set up the movement keys and options, then transfer you back to LADDER.
At the moment, once you've successfully completed the 7th distinct level (Gang Land), the program just cycles through all 7 seven levels over and over again until the bonus time becomes too short to actually finish a level. If anyone knows what the original program actually did (I never managed to get anywhere near to completing the original game), let me know and I'll see what I can do.
The Delay(ms) call in Turbo Pascal only works for a Z80 running at up to 32MHz (and TINST will only allow you to specify a value of up to 20MHZ if I recall correctly). So if you're trying to run this on a system with an effective clock speed of greater than 32MHz, you're going to have to come up with another mechanism. That's not an insurmountable roadblock though; on my 144MHz-Z80-equivalent RunCPM box running on a Teensy 4.0, I patched the Turbo Pascal runtime to make a call to a BDOS extension I created to call the Arduino's delay() function. Works like a charm. If your system includes any kind of millisecond counter you can read, that's a good spot to start looking.