> I do not know whether good macro-assemblers existed for 6502 They certainly did. I don't know about the communities that grew around Commodore, Atari, or oth

> I do not know whether good macro-assemblers existed for 6502 They certainly did. I don't know about the communities that grew around Commodore, Atari, or other 6502-based computers, but in the Apple II world, there were multiple macro assemblers available. Possibly the most famous was Merlin. As a pre-teen, I used the Mindcraft Assembler. Mindcraft even sold another product called Macrosoft, which was a macro library for their assembler that tried to combine the speed of assembly language with a BASIC-like syntax. The major downside, compared to both hand-coded assembly and Applesoft BASIC (which was stored in a pre-tokenized binary format), was the size of the executable. Edit: Speaking of simulating a more powerful CPU, Steve Wozniak implemented the SWEET16 [1] bytecode interpreter as part of his original Apple II ROM. Apple Pascal used p-code. And a more recent bytecode interpreter for the Apple II is PLASMA [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16 [2]: https://github.com/dschmenk/plasma https://github.com/dschmenk/plasma