Garkus walked into his local Subway and walked out with the exact machines that used to show footlong prices and cookie deals. Staff were swapping the old digital menu boards for newer ones, and the discarded units headed straight into a trash pile until he asked if he could take a few. Three Advantec DS081 media players and four commercial displays later, the experiment began.
These super-slim, fanless boxes sat in a sandwich shop for years, running continuously. They aren’t particularly high-end, but they still have some life in them. Under the hood, there’s a sixth-generation Intel Core i3-6100U processor clocked at 2.3 GHz, four gigabytes of DDR4 RAM that can be expanded to eight if necessary, a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive, and Intel HD Graphics 520. They have the conventional ports: HDMI, USB 3.0, Ethernet, and a micro PCIe slot.
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He began by upgrading the RAM, and one of them received a full eight-gigabyte stick. Then came Windows 10 installation, which loaded quickly and dumped the user to a normal desktop rather than the Subway interface. Then he attempted to install macOS on one of them and was successful, even fooling the system into thinking it was a 2016 MacBook Pro, despite the lack of graphics acceleration. The third one received Bazzite, a Linux distribution created expressly to assist get games operating on obsolete hardware. SteamOS was difficult to get operating since the storage interface was incompatible.
So he fired up Peggle on the Bazzite machine, and it worked perfectly. It’s a good game to have on that system. Then he tried Minecraft, which handled all of the TNT explosions admirably, albeit at a slower frame rate. He even attempted to run Grand Theft Auto V on the Windows PC, but it just couldn’t handle the workload due to a lack of fans and limited power delivery.
Surprisingly, games that don’t require a lot of power appear to run fairly well on these older systems. The compact size and low power demand make it ideal for older console titles such as PS2 and original Xbox games. He dug into the old Subway software, and it appears that they have a huge number of menu templates, complete with files for things like Submelts and big cheese steaks, but no secret treasures, just the standard signage materials.
Then disaster almost struck during testing when one of his testers knocked over a Pepsi, and he believed everything was lost, but it turns out these little computers are incredibly resilient. They continue running even after they have finished serving sandwiches.
