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.
