The Hardhat Climber (Lo Scalatore)

"The Hardhat Climber" is a VIC-20 video game written in BASIC by Chris Lesher and subsequently published in the January 1984 issue of Compute's Gazette as a type-in listing.

In Italy, the game was known under the name "Lo Scalatore" following its appearance in the SuperVIC & C64 magazine (June 1984).

As a tribute to this simple yet beautiful game, I embarked on a complete reverse-engineering of its source code, comprising a total of 79 tightly packed BASIC V2 lines. The resulting commented file can be seen here. Please note that the comments are provided in Italian.

I've taken the liberty of creating an enhanced version of the game by turning it into machine language using the Mospeed compiler. This improved edition features a slightly accelerated game pace with a flicker-free smooth animation achieved by synchronizing screen drawing with the raster beam. Furthermore, some minor bugs have been fixed, and a proper credit/copyright screen page has been added. You can download this 2023 turbo edition here.

This repository also contains the following:

• the original BASIC listing typed in by saver71 from the SuperVIC magazine.
• the original game file in .prg format.

Additional folders in this repository include:

• cbm_prg_studio/: CBM PRG STUDIO files used during the conversion from .prg
• asmproc/: (W.I.P.) an attempt to create a pure machine language version of the game
• mospeed/: Mospeed compiler files
• original/: original files
• xc/: (W.I.P.) an attempt to create an XC= Basic version of the game