Would such a thing be allowed? The idea being to have my trader stood up on a cloud instance. This is to stop me having to leave my Macbook on all the time. It annoys my wife and the heat from the base cracked the kitchen table and we had to get a replacement. It does seem possible to run 3D games on AWS for example but I just wanted to check I wasn't violating any rules by doing so.
You made me curious. Knowing just a little bit about how AWS does their billing, I wanted to know how much this would cost. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ There are two instance types that give access to GPU. You probably want the P2 instance type for "general purpose gpu" access (read: cheaper). https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricing/ The cheap way to get AWS instances is to commit to running the instance for a year (reserved rather than on demand.) The smallest P2 instance with no-up front fees will cost you.... Wait for it. $582.54 per month Ouch. I suppose you could run it on-demand for about $1 per hour. But even 8 hours a day for a month is $240. I'm sure you could buy a pre-owned computer that can run EQ, and stuff it in some corner of the house for much cheaper.
When I run my trader, its on a Dell D620 laptop i got for $9 on ebay (i had to add mem and hd, which i had already).
I scooped up an old Mac mini, ready to play EQ for ~50 bucks. That's pocket change when converted into your American dollars.
I probably didn't explain myself very well. My wife loves tech, loves streaming her TV shows over Plex etc. Except tech is NOT to have wires. Ever. Thus buying something cheap, second hand to leave running is not an option. Eventually I am going to buy a decent server, stick it in a cupboard and spin up VM's on that but for now I was curious to explore the cloud option. Question I have is would you need such a beefy GPU as the P2 instances have? Surely if you can get an Ubuntu desktop up on a T2 instance then you should be able to get EQ running with Wine/PlayonLinux. It is a near 20 year old game after all. If you can get it running on a T2 instance then you should be able to stay cheap (if not within the free tier). I might give it a go as long as someone doesn't say that doing it will cause the banhammer to fall.
Can you elaborate? I read this, played for 3hrs 22mins, came back and reread this post. I found a lenovo thinkpad edge 14 on ebay for $140 USD and it has wifi, i3 processor, 4GB of memory, and no wires outside of a power cable. So... does she expect new electronics to run off batteries or solar power within your home?
As far as a Macbook heating up bad enough to crack a table...you have bigger issues. The bad thing about most laptops and especially Macs is they suck up the dust something fierce. They NEED to be pulled apart and cleaned, sometimes repasted. Also run this with fans turned up https://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control Aside from this, I would not recommend running/paying for a cloud to just dedicate to a trader account. It won't make the ban hammer fall by itself, but it does make eyebrows raise a bit. As mentioned prior, a netbook would be more than sufficient for just a trader looking at the floor. Most don't heat up and don't have fans that clog up. Most have wifi. I have a busted up Acer that does just fine with a single client if I wanted to. It's specs are horrible.
Ok doke. Officially its a no. Which is fine by me. Just about to shut this Macbook down to give it a clean. It's a 2011 model and I don't think I have ever cleaned it (oops). Going to look into spinning up a VM on my crappy home server. A 1 GB RAM instance should be fine.
