kys-pascal

About

Heroes of Jin Yong, first published in 1996, is a series of wuxia role-playing games based on the novels of Jin Yong. kys-pascal is a Pascal-language remake of the classic DOS RPG Heroes of Jin Yong that can run most of the original's user-made mods by pointing it at different resource directories. It also has a separate, less complete C++ branch called kys-pascal-c, produced by AI-translating the Pascal code roughly line for line — playable through most of its flow, but with a further, unfinished "feature/cpp-migration-fixes" fork where the story can't progress and battle controls don't work correctly.

How it differs from the original

Unlike the newer, more actively developed kys-cpp remake of the same game, kys-pascal keeps the original codebase's dated, largely unmodified design, which the author calls messy and hard to extend. Its text handling is forced to UTF-8 for code and display, while save files and the game's original resource files still use the legacy Big5 encoding.

Getting started

Playing it requires downloading the original game's resource files separately, then building the Pascal version with Lazarus/FPC (or, less recommended, Delphi Community Edition) plus SDL3 bindings for Pascal. An Android build is also possible but described by the author as complicated and not recommended.

Media

Licensing & legal

• The separately downloaded game resource files are mostly commercial assets, and using them for profit is prohibited.

Additional notes

Note

The author explicitly recommends against studying this codebase beyond nostalgia or running old mods, calling its design messy and hard to extend, and points people to the actively developed kys-cpp remake instead.