> But if you look at the 6502 instruction set... there's just no reasonable way to make it 16-bit
I remember being partial to the 6809 - It seemed like Motorola was able to do the 8bit (6800) to 8/16bit (6809) transition with that processor pretty well. But IIRC the only "mainstream" system using it was the Radio Shack color computer. I had the z80 based Timex-Sinclair color computer (I think this was known as the 2068) but I wanted to play with 6809 assembly programming so I built an expansion card with a 6809 on it and created my own 6809 assembler in Z80 assembly - I could assemble 6809 code on the TS and then send the resulting program over to the RAM in the expansion board and signal it to run the program and then have it send results back to the Z80 side - I remember being so excited when I got that all to work (Oh, to be young again and have time and energy for such projects :)
> I loved writing assembly for the 68k.
Later on I got an Atari ST and bought the full development system (C compiler, and a bunch Xeroxed docs). 68K assembly was indeed so nice - it's just sad that Intel won and we were stuck with x86 ISA for so long. I really never got into assembly programming for x86 because it was so ugly by comparison I just couldn't bear to look at it.
I remember being partial to the 6809 - It seemed like Motorola was able to do the 8bit (6800) to 8/16bit (6809) transition with that processor pretty well. But IIRC the only "mainstream" system using it was the Radio Shack color computer. I had the z80 based Timex-Sinclair color computer (I think this was known as the 2068) but I wanted to play with 6809 assembly programming so I built an expansion card with a 6809 on it and created my own 6809 assembler in Z80 assembly - I could assemble 6809 code on the TS and then send the resulting program over to the RAM in the expansion board and signal it to run the program and then have it send results back to the Z80 side - I remember being so excited when I got that all to work (Oh, to be young again and have time and energy for such projects :)
> I loved writing assembly for the 68k.
Later on I got an Atari ST and bought the full development system (C compiler, and a bunch Xeroxed docs). 68K assembly was indeed so nice - it's just sad that Intel won and we were stuck with x86 ISA for so long. I really never got into assembly programming for x86 because it was so ugly by comparison I just couldn't bear to look at it.