invaders (in C)

About

Space Invaders is a 1978 fixed shooter developed and published by Taito for arcades (and released overseas through Midway), credited as the first fixed shooter and the first video game with endless gameplay; players defeat descending waves of aliens with a horizontally moving laser cannon. invaders (in C) is a from-scratch Space Invaders clone built as an Intel 8080 CPU emulator in C with SDL, written explicitly to be easy to read for people learning how emulators work. It requires the original arcade ROM to run and targets Linux.

How it differs from the original

The DAA instruction and AC flag are not emulated, and several planned features (fullscreen mode, sound, and color) aren't yet implemented, though the author notes the game is fully playable since those missing pieces only affect the credits display.

Getting started

It requires the original Space Invaders arcade ROM (as a single file, or as separate ROM chip dumps concatenated together); once the ROM is in place, the emulator builds with a single command and runs directly from the command line.

Known issues & limitations

• emulation: The DAA instruction and AC flag are not implemented; these are only used to display credits.
• feature: Sound is not implemented.
• feature: Color support is not implemented.