It Is Technically Possible To Play GTA Vice City On A Router Itself
It Is Technically Possible To Play GTA Vice City On A Router Itself
Image: kittenlabs.de
We joke around how DOOM is capable of running in whatever kind of hardware you can imagine, but this time around it’s not this game that gets involved in the latest episode of Games Running On Places It Shouldn’t Have Been. Instead, a German hardware hacker has somehow managed to shove a full GTA Vice City into a router itself, thanks to the help of a Radeon GPU and good old Linux.
Image: kittenlabs.de
While any kind of modern Windows system can run GTA Vice City from a performance standpoint, the game is still comparatively more demanding than DOOM, which was released 8 years prior. Making it run within the TP-Link TL-WDR4900 (a Wi-Fi 4 or 802.11n router), then, will require some external help. Enter Radeon HD 7470 – this GPU acts as an eGPU via a custom mPCIe connector, which requires the hacker to cut open the motherboard traces to gain access to the connection from the CPU.
Image: kittenlabs.de
Then, Debian Linux is used on top of Openwrt with all the necessary modules to make this whole thing work. Notably, the old Radeon card was used as the newer RX 570 failed to run due to compatibility issues. Then, a modified version of GTA Vice City had to be used, given that the game was never released on Linux platforms.
Here’s the game running on the router in action:
The reason behind this experiment was down to the router’s great performance at its time, thanks to the NXP/Freescale QorIQ P1014 CPU (effectively a PowerPC e500v2 processor). Granted, this is mostly answering a question that perhaps nobody had asked, but this is exactly why experiments like this one are fun to look at.
Pokdepinion: This truly proves that the sky is the limit when it comes to modding.
