I've frequently seen replies to queries wanting to use one part which say, " Why don't you use THIS part?"

Often that means use a $50 part requiring $5K of support hardware/software and a complete redesign, when all the OP wants is to use his 50-cent part to do something he hopes will be useful. He said he wants to use external memory. In that case, it matters not how much internal code space there is, since he's not wanting to use it.

It's true, it's often easier to solve a different problem, but when I ask someone how to change a sparkplug, it doesn't help me to be told that the car I've bought is the wrong car.

The OP apparently wants to use his part as a garden-variety i8032, which should be straightforward enough. He apparently doesn't realize that there's no valid "empty" state for external memory. If the MCU is set to use external program memory, it will look there for its instructions and behave accordingly. If there's no valid code there, it will take what random bits appear on its data inputs and execute them faithfully. The least any sensible person would do under such circumstances is to provide a PROM full of valid no-op's.

RE