Once upon a time, there was a magazine called Linux User & Developer (LUD). It was a reasonable title, but not in the same highcalibre league as Linux Format. Noting it could never be LXF, LUD did the honourable thing and ordered its parent company to pledge fealty and hand over all assets to Future Towers. So for a while LUD was part of the Future family, and then a spreadsheet in London cried out in panic and suddenly LUD was no more. (I’m pretty sure none of that really happened – Ed). Anyway in issue 136 of LUD, a young Russell Barnes introduced a great project called Pivaders, a Space Invaders clone written in about 300 lines of code. Then in the next issue he added some bells and whistles, in particular animations and sound.
It was a great project andis from February 2014 and in that era writing code in Python 3 was seen as a little postmodern. In this era, most distros have done away with Python 2 and attempts to install it often lead to problems later. Especially on Raspberry Pi OS if our reader letters are anything to go by. Anyway, we digress. So with as light a touch as possible, we set about updating Russell’s dusty old code. After not too much hassle, we got it into a workable shape and now you can download it from our GitLab:
