Your final project is today's automotive hackery. :) It might be "woefully obsolete", but a derivative of the HC11 is in an engine control unit (ECU) from a 90

Your final project is today's automotive hackery. :) It might be "woefully obsolete", but a derivative of the HC11 is in an engine control unit (ECU) from a 90's-era Mitsubishi model that quite a few folks, myself included, take a hobby interest in as means to making our cars go a little faster than is reasonable or was intended, on the cheap. Another platform (that I have a much stronger personal interest in) is SH4-based. 256k of ROM (1M on newer versions of the car), 256k of RAM (512k on the newer version), and that's all you get to control a modern fuel-injected, variable-timing four-cylinder engine in real time. This "old stuff" is still very applicable, depending on the field; the automotive industry is wrapped tightly in a time distortion field. ;)