I’m a bit concerned about fitting the LCD, the long "bar" style is rare. The closest option has high resolution; I’ve found an RGB 565/666 parallel display with 960x320 resolution. This requires a lot of IOs, using up almost all the GPIOs on a PI2040, and it would also consume a significant amount of RAM. I’m not even sure if 262kB would be enough. PI PIO is nice but I have no idea how to use it right..
The ESP32’s PSRAM is theoretically fast enough, and maybe an external shift register could handle the parallel to serial conversion to clock in the data at a reasonable speed using the native SPI on the ESP32. This would need to be faster than approximately 833kHz x 4. I’m confident the ESP32’s SPI can manage 5MHz. Again, this is just a supposition. I’m planning to get some materials in-house: PI2040, ESP32, and the display.