Sounds nice, but the 6502 is certainly real, available hardware that you can buy and set up on a breadboard.
There are tutorials on youtube for it as well, such as Ben Eater's tutorial.
There are tutorials on youtube for it as well, such as Ben Eater's tutorial.
The *only* advantage the 6502 has is the exposed and non-multiplexed address and data busses, which you can single-step and examine with an Arduino or something.
The whole setup is going to cost you the thick end of $100.
But you can do that just as easily in an emulator.
And meanwhile with RISC-V you can get an ESP32-C3 board with 400k RAM for a dollar or two, or the 1 GHz 64 MB RAM 64 bit Linux Milk-V Duo for $5. And if you wish, run exactly the same programs on a $2500 64 core 128 GB RAM Pioneer. And bunches of $10, $30, $70, $100, $200 boards (and now $400 laptops) in between.
Only ARM gives you similar breadth, but the instruction sets of a Cortex-M0 and M4 Mac are so different they might as well be from different companies.
OTOH, the Z80 is better for this, because you can at least get CP/M up and running with a minimum of trouble.