Does anyone remember a similar thing that's not a game but an emulator-ish for a very simple cpu + color screen that people made small games / demos on? I wish I remembered more details or that I'd bookmarked it when I saw it...
This is a stretch, but could you be thinking of PICO-8? It's a "fantasy console" that you can write 32k game cartridges for using a subset of Lua: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
I think about the CHIP-8 VM, then the CHIP SBC, and its PocketCHIP variant, which comes with Pico-8. They're all kind of intertwined in my mind, and thinking of any one tends to lead to all the others.