Yeah, it was my understanding that the opcodes directly encoded what we would nowadays call microcode, that is, bits which selected which CPU component acted on

Yeah, it was my understanding that the opcodes directly encoded what we would nowadays call microcode, that is, bits which selected which CPU component acted on which data[1], so these illegal instructions are just unused bit patterns that select various operations just by having those bits set, not something that was ever intended to be actually used. So it would make sense that they're not documented, since they're entirely incidental. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXdoim96v5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXdoim96v5A