[rzach]

Thanks for the recommendations. I've briefly looked at the 6502 instruction set. Part of the problem is that most of those real-world CPUs use multibyte instructions, which I'm not opposed to, but I'm not sure how to actually incorporate them into my current design (It would be a lot easier if I just did a 6502 emulator without any of the logic gate stuff). Thus I'm trying to come up with an instruction set that utilizes only 8 bits per instruction.

[simonblack]

I'm fairly rusty on 1970s CPUs, but digging back into the recesses of my memory I have a feeling that the PDP-8 used single-byte instructions. (or maybe I am remembering the EDUC-8 project that was based on the PDP-8.)