Due to life's circumstances, I haven't been able to pursue this project as it is for the last 4 years, and it seems I won't be able to do so for a while yet.

The dream of building my own CPU is not dead yet, so there will be a follow up on it soon (I hope).

I found out recently there are inexpensive FPGAs available on AliExpress, so I've ordered one (Tang Nano 9k), and plan to play with it, at the same time finally learning Verilog, and then will try to implement architecture described in this project (with some modifications) on it. This will provide much more portable solution, definitely cheaper, though not a true discrete component cpu, but still something more tangible than software simulation.