I’m currently mindblown at one of the programs publicly available for download in the software, which is a NEC PC-8801 emulator... I peeked at the BASIC code and it does indeed appear to be emulating a Z80 and it even includes support for loading real BIOS dumps and floppy images seemingly.
I can’t find much information about the software online but I think it was developed for one of the competitions and I’d highly recommend checking it out if you decide to purchase SmileBASIC 4.
Can you share a link? Do you think would it be possible to play with the code from the (free) book "Machine code for beginners" [0] with that emulator? I'd like to get some familiarity with machine code, and thought maybe it's a simplest way to start with. Or maybe you can give other suggestions for the emulator?
From the book (page 3):
> The book is specially written for computers with a Z80 or 6502 microprocessor.
I can’t find much information about the software online but I think it was developed for one of the competitions and I’d highly recommend checking it out if you decide to purchase SmileBASIC 4.