alt Hacker News100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO.
It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
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The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy.
Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
> the first attempt <…> good enough to criticize.
Ooh, I like this phrase.
I'm not sure that's true. I have an eZ80-based emulator for the AgonLight2 that is already running well enough to run some real (console-based) ROMs: https://git.phial.org/d6/uxn-ez80/
(I'm new to eZ80 assembly so the project is going slower than it otherwise might.)
The AgonLight2 has 512K of RAM and a 20 MHz CPU which is more than enough for Varvara.
I agree that 8-bit computers of the era (e.g. Pet, Apple 2, C64, TI/99a, etc.) don't have enough RAM to give Varvara its own 64k of memory (though it wouldn't be hard to design a Varvara variant with a smaller memory space) but otherwise there really aren't major barriers. As far as permacomputing goes though, there are plenty of hosts out there with enough memory to comfortably run Varvara (anything 32-bit will be fine, most 16-bit computers would also be fine).
Based on my eZ80-based implementation I think any of the eZ80-based TI calculators with 128k or more of user-accessible memory could implement Varvara without major problems.