[jecel]

Any project that will only be programmed in BASIC, C or something will make the processor it uses irrelevant. Only if there is some assembly will the processor matter.

One fun pseudo-retro project would be an incremental BASIC compiler which allows simple inline assembly. That is: any given line can be either a BASIC statement or an assembly instruction. The "incremental" part would be that every time a new line is entered the program is patched to include it. The program would be stored in machine language with two helper tables: line number to address mapping and variable name to address mapping. When you LIST it would decompile each line as it goes to the screen (easy to do since the compiler wouldn't have any optimizations). BASIC already has to include a garbage collector to deal with strings so this would not add too much complexity.

I agree that the 68000 is nicer to program in assembly than the RISC-V. I started a simple RISC (only a short presentation so far) with the goal of having nice assembly code: https://github.com/jeceljr/baby42