Unix and core utilities are easy to implement and run everywhere. NetBSD runs on a toaster. A Z-Machine interpreter runs text games under 2MB under Musl based OpenWRT, a C compiler like TinyCC and DFrotz. A tiny Perl edition with that, under 16MB. I ran Linux (yes, OpenWRT) under an AMRV5 machine with 32MB of RAM, 48 with the compressed ZRAM. I could script things local and remotely in these constrained specs.

For tiny games (and applications) in these machines, SDL ran everywhere, so most 320x240 and 640x480 ran on these embedded machines. Uberportable, fasts an dedicated UIs existed such as the GP2X menu. Thank libre software and Unix like OS and libraries for that. SDL and framebuffer based software exists, such as PDF readers and video players. Thus, you could design an electronic billboard for ads in the streets/subway with very little and a ridiculous power cost, being the big screen the most costly component here.

Back in the day, for SCUMMVM (Lucas Arts adventure games) they used tons of Unix utilities to generate the engine and data handling, they saved lots of hours on engineering. The same happens today. These small tools, with little preparation (The AWK programming language, man ksh, "perldoc perlintro"...) can do in days what for the programmers of non-Unix OSs took weeks of clumsy Python hacking.