Building an Intel 8080 Emulator in C++

October 12, 2026

I’ve been developing an Intel 8080 emulator in C++.

The project started as an opportunity to better understand how processors execute instructions and manage their internal state.

Architecture

The emulator separates the CPU and memory into distinct components.

This makes it easier to test instruction behavior independently.

Instruction Decoding

One of the more interesting parts of the project has been implementing the instruction decoder.

For example:

```cpp void CPU::step() { uint8_t opcode = memory.read(pc++); execute(opcode); }