Today I had the thought (while programming the 65816), "sure would be nice if I could compare A with X easily." Is it possible to do this without storing one of the values to memory?

One silly way to do this is to decrement A and X together in a loop and see which one hits zero first. Is there a better way? (As for why I want to do this, I'm just curious about pushing this architecture to its limits:)

doing it like that would work but be really really inefficient.
so there is no easy way to get around using memory
the easiest option would be to just push X onto the stack and compare A to it. as that won't require working with any specific address, just make sure both registers have the same width so the compare works correctly, and don't forget to pull X from the stack after your branching code

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I like both of your methods because I don't have to make up an arbitrary temporary variable name. Thanks.