I ran into an old post of mine saying I didn't really play anything right then or own a rig for doing so, and that I was backlogging it and waiting to grow old and gray before playing all the games on a powerful machine. Well roughly 17 years later I AM gray and turns out this forum is still standing and no administration is seen around to stop me from posting about how these things are going, even if no-one cares.
So it's the future and my main box is a low power system from like 2015, the Rock Pi 4B with 6x arm64 cpu cores and 4GB ram. It is anything BUT a powerful device. What it does have is access to the latest linux kernel and the full GNU Compiler toolchain, so ... among other things, like running regular Windows apps or emulating systems up to Gamecube, I just compiled Sonic Mania for it, it ended up as a native linux app, and runs flawlessly.
My second box is a Starfive 2 from Visionfive. This one is even more weird, it's a risc-v 0.7 device. I can compile Mania for it, but it will run at seconds per frame because it doesn't recognize the GLES2 library the GPU is using. It does play ports of Mario 64, Quake, Tomb Raider, Carmageddon and the like pretty flawlessly, runs DosBox, QEMU and can emulate Wintel stuff with Box64, like the arm64 box. It's got single channel 8 GB RAM and I've stuck a terabyte nvme in there, so it's about as powerful and useful as a pentium IV used to be.
Why bother with this?
For one, this raspberry pi-ish stuff uses far less power than a x86-64 system, meaning it extrudes less heat, which in turn means it can be passively cooled. This was the main selling point for me. When I return from work, my desktop computer sits there waiting for me, idling at 0.5-0.7 watt, in complete silence. I bought my son a reasonably powerful ryzen 7 laptop and while that thing runs circles around my glorified router desktop systems when compiling code or playing Rome: Total War or whatever, it doesn't actually open Firefox and the file manager / desktop apps that much faster to warrant the heat and noise it produces.
For other... well it depends on where you live or what kinds of computing power you have access to. So back in 2019 I bought a bunch of this arm64 stuff, including cheap Android boxes, just to experiment, because at that point it was dirt cheap (pre-covid optimism, no tariifs yet, arm64 software parity still in development): when I say dirt cheap I mean it: 7 euro for two Rock Pi S boards (4x1500 mHz 64-bit CPU, 512 MB of ram, integrated audio device) was a complete steal as they ended up going for 77 apiece later on when covid hit. An "Orange Pi Zero 2" was 12 euro, today it's roughly 27. Android boxes were cheap, I bought two, installed desktop linux on both of them since they ran some ancient android 8 or something, then benched them for a few years. Fast forward to today, these are actually useful as the integrated GPU's they've got going are now supported. So I built native Zelda OoT and Flycast emulators on my main machine, sent those apps over to the cheap linux desktopped android boxes and they just fucking worked there like these were all actual bloody computers and my mind was blown.
In short, it's the future and instead of having a powerful PC I'm aside from two main low-power machines running a passively cooled cluster of small development boxes, two of them are Pentium-grade computers that mostly just transfer sound to speakes, one serves up a firewall, one is there just in case anyone needed more storage and compute power, and they can do shit like remotely run apps and share folders and shit between them. None of them can play Red Dead Redemtion 2 or most of the games on my backlog. (That's what my phone is for.)
It's all pretty useless, but I guess I'm happy.
Thank you for your ... attendance to this rant.