Did anyone consider potentially porting some of the cool retroemulation projects that already run on Raspberry Pi pico hardware to the PicoCalc? Two that come to mind are PicoMac (GitHub - evansm7/pico-mac: Run the popular umac emulator right on your Pi Pico!) and Pico-ZxSpectrum (GitHub - fruit-bat/pico-zxspectrum: ZX Spectrum for Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 and RP2350). There is so much potential on PicoCalc that it’s even hard to stay focused 
Flavio
I think it is possible but I am not sure if it will actually work. I asked the creator of ZXBaremulator, a ZX Spectrum emulator that runs on different versions of Raspberry Pi and it is almost like having a real working device, but unfortunately he replied that the model used for PicoCalc is not compatible. I am searching for other solutions and I am hoping that someone could eventually make this work properly. I also asked if another emulator called M.CU.M.E. would work on a PicoCalc. The response was that I would configure the firmware of the PicoCalc in order to make it work. Maybe in the future there will be a Raspberry Pi Pico ZX Spectrum bare emulator that will work on the PicoCalc.
We should make this work on the picocalc GitHub - Jean-MarcHarvengt/MCUME: Multi CompUter Machine Emulator for several MCUs
the main issue you’re likely to run into is the added overhead of integrating the spi driver for the LCD screen and the i2c scanning of the keyboard
emulators on pico are usually very tightly coded to squeeze performance out of it, and there might either not be enough left to do those things, or they’ll be hard to integrate