You must be young. A PS2 can run a modernish Linux with WindowMaker and decode MP3's, maybe FLAC and Opus and some MP3+XVid/DivX videos. Not so far from a cycle

You must be young. A PS2 can run a modernish Linux with WindowMaker and decode MP3's, maybe FLAC and Opus and some MP3+XVid/DivX videos. Not so far from a cycle accurate emulation of a low end Windows 98 era PC. A PS2 with Linux can comment on this page for instance. With TLS et all, if you use Dillo as the web browser as it uses MbedTLS. The TLS handshake might ast a few seconds but that's it. Try running that on a cycle accurate emulator without bringing an i7 to its knees. A similar PC would be a Pentium II-III at 450-500 MHZ with 64MB of RAM running Damn Small Linux or NetBSD with a small Window Maker setup. Bear in mind that you could run a non-accurate SNES emulation in that machine, with sound outputted at 8000 HZ and with no filters, enough for most common games such as Chrono Trigger and Super Mario World with lots of hacks fixing the imprecise timing under ZSNES.