Since I started tinkering with the MO5, I’ve learned quite a lot, sometimes the hard way, often by spending my evenings on it 😉
I documented all of this on this blog, step by step, sharing what I discovered, the problems I ran into, and most importantly the solutions I found to make development a bit more… enjoyable.
Because let’s be honest, coding on MO5 today, without the right tools, can quickly become complicated.
Between installing toolchains, hardware constraints, differences between emulator and real machine, and bugs that are sometimes hard to understand, there’s plenty of room to get discouraged.
And at some point, I realized something simple.
👉 all of this should be much easier
The idea
Today, we have amazing tools.
We have the cloud, we have environments ready in seconds, we have AI capable of generating code or assets.
So why should developing on MO5 be more complicated than building a web app in 2026?
That’s how this video series was born.
The goal is simple: start from scratch, and end up with a complete game, but using a modern approach:
development in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces, asset generation with AI, using a ready-to-use template, and testing in an online emulator.
No installation.
No complex configuration.
Just code 😉
What we are going to build
The goal of this series is to build a small shoot’em up game (basically Space Invaders).
A ship, enemies, bullets, a score system, lives management, and a game over.
Nothing revolutionary.
But complete enough to understand the basics.
And most importantly, concrete enough to see a real game taking shape throughout the videos.
Why this series
When I started, I would have loved to have a series like this.
Something simple, progressive, showing things concretely, without diving straight into heavy technical details.
Something that makes you think: “ok, I can do this too”.
That’s exactly what I tried to build here.
Series structure
The series is divided into several short videos, each one adding a new piece to the game.
We start by setting up the environment and displaying a first sprite, then we progressively add interactions, gameplay, and different mechanics.
The idea is really to build step by step.
The videos
I will add links to the different videos here as they are published.
Video 1, environment setup and displaying a sprite
👉 coming soon
Video 2, player movement and shooting
👉 coming soon
Video 3, score display, lives management and pause
👉 coming soon
Video 4, enemies and enemy shooting
👉 coming soon
Video 5, collisions and game over
👉 coming soon
The code
The full project code is available on GitHub.
You can either follow the series step by step, or directly check the final result.
👉 https://github.com/thlg057/mo5-space-invaders-tutorial
There is a branch and a tag for each step, making it easier to follow the progression.
Conclusion
I don’t know yet if this series will be useful.
But I hope it will at least help some people discover the MO5, or get back into it, without going through the same struggles I did 😉
And most importantly, to show that in 2026, you can still have fun with a machine from 1984.