Someone ran Grand Theft Auto on a wi-fi router  

It may not sound as wild as running Doom on a pregnancy test or gut bacteria, but someone managed to modify their household wi-fi router to run Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which is almost equally impressive (source: PC Watch). 

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is the fourth installment of the Grand Theft Auto series, published in 2002 by Rockstar Games. The popular open-world game was used in what is likely the first successful (or any) attempt to create a “gaming router.” Hardware modders Manawyrm and tSYS modified a TP-Link wi-fi router, attached an AMD Radeon HD 7470 graphics card to it, installed Debian Linux, and finally managed to boot and play GTA: Vice City. 

It seems that what made this possible was the specific model of router – the TP-Link TL-WDR4900 v1 router uses a relatively high-performance PowerPC e500v2 32-bit processor, which is apparently more than enough to run a game like Vice City. 

Externally attaching a graphics card made it possible to connect to a display, however a modified version of Vice City’s source code was needed to get the game booted on the Linux-powered router. A more detailed account of the experiment by the modders themselves can be found on KittenLabs

Amber V
Amber V

Novice Editor-in-Chief since October 2023.

She grew up playing Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein with her dad, and is now enamored with obscure Japanese video games and internet culture. Currently devoted to growing Automaton West to the size of its Japanese sister-site, while making sure to keep news concise and developer stories deep and stimulating.

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