[jordand]

I tried reviving my Asus Eee PC 1015PEM (1.5GHz dual core, 2GB RAM) and even running Linux Mint was a bit much for it (basic tasks were slow, and Wine had too much overhead for games). I initially tried upgrading the Windows 7 Starter to Windows 10, and while the upgrade did work...it was failing to even log in! Whole thing just seemed stalled.

[lproven]

You went the wrong direction. Go older, not newer.

After trying dozens of lightweight Linuxes with disappointing results, I downgraded my Sony Vaio P to WinXP. This has full GPU acceleration on Intel Pouslbo and for XP the machine's 2GB of RAM is spacious. Sad, but there we are.

[anthk]

For games Mednafen and PCSXR do wonders; and SCummvm itself supports tons of graphical and text adventures (even modern ones such as Technobabylon) and tons of source ports (and recompilations such as Super Mario 64) will run fine with just the bundled GL 2.1 adapter.

Instead of Mint I'd pick something like Alpine Linux with LXQT:

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/LXQt

Also, adding ZRAM will fly on that machine.

Also, you can build SCUMMVM (install alpine-sdk, get the alpine ports and edit the pkg build file so scummvm gets compiled with these options at the configure build stage:

    #!/bin/sh
    sh configure \
  --enable-static \
  --enable-all-engines \
   --enable-all-unstable-engines \
   --enable-release \
   --enable-plugins \
   --disable-hq-scalers \
  --disable-dlc \
  --disable-scummvmdlc \
   --disable-discord

With these options even Macromedia Director stuff will run (maybe Encarta 95 and the like) and modern games such as Technobabylon, Thimbleweed Park and so on.

[Narishma]

Zswap is better than ZRAM for this use case. ZRAM is only really interesting in situations where you don't want any swap to disk, like when running on an SD card or something.

[Narishma]

Mint is too big for something like this. You should go for something lighter weight like Alpine or NetBSD.