Intel 8080 Emulator — Space Invaders

A cycle-accurate Intel 8080 emulator written in Rust from scratch, running the original Space Invaders ROM. Ships two frontends: a native SDL2 desktop build and a WebAssembly build with a React UI.

The core emulator (CPU, memory, interrupt handling, shift-register hardware) was written entirely from scratch. The web frontend was built with LLM assistance.

Demo

Tab to insert a coin · 1 to start · ← → to move · Space to fire

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Prerequisites

Web build

Tool	Install
Rust + Cargo	rustup.rs
wasm-pack	curl https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/installer/init.sh -sSf | sh
Node.js ≥ 18	nodejs.org

Native SDL2 build

SDL2 must be installed as a system library.

Platform	Command
macOS	brew install sdl2
Debian / Ubuntu	sudo apt install libsdl2-dev
Arch Linux	sudo pacman -S sdl2
Windows	Install SDL2 development libraries and add them to your library path

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Building & Running

Web emulator (recommended)

Build the WASM package and start the dev server in one step:

./scripts/dev-web.sh

Or run the steps separately:

# 1. Compile Rust → WASM
./scripts/build-wasm.sh

# 2. Start the frontend
cd i8080-web && npm install && npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173.

Native SDL2 emulator

./scripts/build-native.sh
./target/release/i8080_emulator

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Controls

Key	Action
Tab	Insert Coin
1	1 Player Start
2	2 Player Start
← / →	Move Left / Right
Space	Fire

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Project Structure

├── src/
│   ├── emulator/       # Core Intel 8080 CPU emulation
│   ├── bin/            # Entry points (native SDL2 + WASM stub)
│   └── space_invaders_wasm.rs  # WASM bindings & framebuffer renderer
├── i8080-web/          # React + Vite frontend
│   └── public/wasm/    # Generated WASM package (output of build-wasm.sh)
├── roms/               # ROM files (space_invaders, gunfight, cpu_diag)
├── libs/               # SDL2 link libraries (Windows)
└── scripts/
    ├── build-wasm.sh   # Compile Rust to WASM
    ├── build-native.sh # Compile native SDL2 binary
    └── dev-web.sh      # build-wasm + start Vite dev server

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Notes

• SDL2 (native build): The libs/ directory contains SDL2 link libraries for Windows. On Linux and macOS, Cargo links against the system-installed SDL2. You do not need to copy any DLL alongside the binary on Linux/macOS — install SDL2 via your package manager as shown above.
• The web build uses an OffscreenCanvas for off-thread compositing, with the framebuffer rendered at native 224 × 256 and scaled up via CSS (image-rendering: pixelated).