Only thing about PICO-8 that makes no sense: the 32k limit. Otherwise, an awesome set of limitations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS
Little excuse for arbitrary limitations even in retro scene. Exception is demoscene where it's kind of the point.
At the same time, I feel the size limit is intended to have the same spirit as the audiovisual ones. Or, if one really wanted the PICO-8's features, but with more space, she could easily recreate the same functionality with another game framework pretty quickly. Perhaps it's almost like a tribute to stuff seen in the C64 demoscene.
As a programmer who's not good at compressing stuff, it would be annoying to have to spend time bashing code to fit an arbitrary limit.
32k is not a pita, its the point, this is a fantasy retro consol, giving it 32 MB would do what ? make it pointless probably
Its also a excellent opportunity to show off, for example, nobody would have thought you could make this on a C64 1984
Also note pico-8 limits the number of instructions executed per frame. So a faster CPU will not increase what you can do. The goal is to make sure all games run even on the least powered hardware.
Here's an emulator: http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/jtyone.html