Space Invaders Emulator

A Taito 8080 arcade emulator written in C#, with a browser frontend.

Play it: invaders.builtbyzee.com

Why

A learning project — built to dig into emulation past the toy stage. Followed a Chip8 emulator I wrote earlier; Space Invaders was the natural next step (real Intel 8080 ISA, real timing constraints, real hardware quirks).

Structure

• SpaceInvadersEmulator.Core — Intel 8080 CPU, MMU, ports, machine state. Pure C#, no I/O.
• SpaceInvadersEmulator.Core.Tests — CPU instruction tests.
• SpaceInvadersEmulator.Wasm — browser-wasm shim that exposes Machine to JS via [JSExport]. Published as an npm package.
• SpaceInvadersEmulator.Web — Svelte 5 + Vite frontend that consumes the npm package, renders the framebuffer to a canvas, and wires audio + input.

Run locally

Requires .NET 10 SDK and Node 20+.

cd SpaceInvadersEmulator.Web
npm install
npm run build:wasm   # one-time, or whenever C# changes
npm run dev

Tests

dotnet test

ROMs

ROMs aren't committed. The Vite build runs a plugin (scripts/vite-plugin-roms.ts) that downloads each game's ROM zip from a public CDN mirror and assembles public/roms/*.bin on first build, cached under .rom-cache/. You can also drag-and-drop your own ROM files onto the page at runtime.