I came to the same revelations when writing my own 6502 assembler in CL. You even get access to the reader in CL which allowed me to write a parser that could r

I came to the same revelations when writing my own 6502 assembler in CL. You even get access to the reader in CL which allowed me to write a parser that could read 6502 assembler source files and compile them. You can start writing a debugger on top, disassembler, and an emulator. You're not restricted in Lisp from doing low-level bit-twiddling of this sort.