Space Invaders on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2

With all of the hoopla surrounding interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, there has never been a better time to brush up on your alien-blasting skills. Sure, it’s almost certainly an ordinary comet. But why take a chance? If that “comet” turns out to be an advance scout for Xur and the Ko-Dan armada, we don’t want to be caught off guard.

However, while Starship may be advancing rapidly, spaceships with laser blasters are still pretty hard to come by for those that want to get some target practice. Fortunately, you can now blast a pixelated army of enemy aliens using the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 that you probably already have. Hobbyist Mikhail Ilin has created a clone of Space Invaders for the Pico that is called Pico Invaders. All you need to make it is a Raspberry Pi Pico 2, a 128×64 OLED display, and a rotary encoder.

It should come as no surprise that a Space Invaders clone can run on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, considering that the original game ran on the incredibly modest resources of an Atari 2600 over 45 years ago. But even though the hardware can easily handle the job, and the circuit is simple, there is still the not-so-small matter of writing the code.

The good news is that you need not be concerned about that part. Ilin has done the work and made it available on GitHub. There are also instructions for programming the board and playing the game. What are you waiting for? Earth is counting on you!