Hi Cecil,
for sure, if you take care, you can put in an '816 as a near-pin-compatible substitute, and indeed it powers up in a 65c02 compatible mode. You might want to check Grant Searle's pages for a minimal system design. And Garth's 6502 primer has lots of resources.
http://searle.hostei.com ...

... Also, I am curious as to how eForth would act as a machine language monitor. A machine language monitor has to be able to touch the bare metal in order to do its job. That's not a specialty of Forth ... [ emphasis added ]
A cringe-worthy claim, BDD. Although it's slightly above my current ...

The 'monitor' of Sun machines - the one you get to when you enter 'Stop A' - is written in Forth.

That is a huge monstrosity, it very large over a MB in size, I like the smaller Forth such as eForth, being just a few KB in size and quite fast. Forth makes an excellent monitor with a lot of the ...

Starting off the 65C816 is a good idea. Too many shy away from it because it is somehow perceived as too complicated or too hard to program. Starting with the 65C816 gives you the opportunity to get familiar with the 6502 assembly language and then open the 65C816's native mode door and take ...

I'm a newbie to the 6502 CPU, I have worked with the 8080, 8085, Z80, MC6809, and MC68000 before designing hardware and software.

I'm retired now and have time to work on hardware/software projects so I want to try out a 6502 design, I looked on eBay and was shocked by the prices for old 6502 PCs ...

Well, I've given some more thought to the subject of an upgrade on the 65c02. I've come up with a design for an upgraded 65c02 that accesses 128KB of memory and is specifically designed to support running a VM and a multi-tasking OS. Of course, I'm thinking of running Forth on the VM, but it should ...