You certainly sound like you know your PICs. I half know about two of them in applied application. The 16F628a and the 16F877a.

 

Have you seen this: http://geoffg.net/maximite.html ?

The guy has made like an old Apple computer using a <snip> PIC!

 

Have you seen this: http://geoffg.net/maximite.html ?

The guy has made like an old Apple computer using a gawd dam PIC!

The PIC32 is an extremely impressive series of uCs. They are giving ARM a run for their money, though a bit late to the game. The beauty of it is they are programmed using the same PICKit 2 or 3 (mostly 3) that is used to program the 8 bit PICs with.

The compilers are vastly different, though gcc for PIC32 is coming along nicely. It is an extremely affordable, yet high power processor. The Arduino Uno32 is based on a 32 bit PIC (Full 32 bit), with the standard ports and usage most are accustomed to.

I'm a fan of "the mostest with the leastest", back all the way to storing data in the UART registers if they weren't used for that program (A practice still carried on today in PICs!). Many people think speed is all that matters(*cough*AVR fans *cough*), and almost as often, those same people have more delay(xx) lines in their code than anybody else, at least until they learn interrupts. The 8 bit PIC uCs running at 32 to 48Mhz giving 8-12 MIPS is a great deal of horsepower. More than the Atari 400/800 or Commodore 64 had with the 6502, though both of them also had a dedicated display processor as well.

A full color touch screen display powered by PIC32 connected it to an 8 bit PIC that runs the actual game or whatnot, and the fun of the Atari games could be realized in portable form again. This idea is already possible with a full color qVGA color touch screen on one side, with a PIC32 on the reverse. Instead of loading more programs on the PIC32, simply optimize it for running the display, and create a standard set of graphics commands, or re-use an existing set, such as X-windows/OpenGL commands. and you have a GPU and display that is "plug and play"