Maybee it would be better to do that. There's one board in my collection with what appears to be a rather powerful microprocessor.

I wonder why some one got rid of it. I've seen kits for $200 dollars, and that does not seem to attractive. And building the EV kit from scratch seems formidible. Maybee, A few dozen pins could be isolated for input and output. But then again there might be all sorts of complications with
the hard drive sending signals and modern computer languages. And still there might be the problem of locating the malfunction.

Or maybee just run it just like a computer, but discard the monitor, etc. and use the parellel port for input and output to mimick the behavior of a 16 bit microprocessor.

At least the approach might be good for educational purposes.