Yes, outside of a virtual machine 1GB of RAM or more is needed. That is because the dCorePlus image that comtains it's large extension is copied to RAM before being loaded with sce-load. This is to allow initially burning the dCorePlus*.iso image to a USB with the dd command, booting with it, installing dCore-usbinstall, then using the same USB to install dCore to with dCore-usbinstall. Writing the dCorePlus image to a USB with the dd command does not allow the USB to be used for a TCE directory.
Folks with older machines will simply need to use dCore instead of dCorePlus and manually download and install the wireless extensions located in the downloads area. Then a machine with 128MB of RAM would be enough to boot dCore and run a simple non-X environment. I just booted dCore-bionic in Virtualbox with a session with 128MB of RAM.