The upshot is you're doing something you really aren't meant to do so the implementation details now matter, notably that the H8 is big-endian and 16 bits wide, and you're running MESS on a little-endian PC. (MESS pre-byte-swaps each 16-bit word so reading through a UNIT16* gives the correct results - if you ran MESS on a big-endian PowerMac, you'd get the results you expect).
How does the actual Cybiko work? Is the RAM disk non-volatile? And surely you can't just load it into memory
