Incredibly, I was able to run GTA: Vice City on an old TP-LINK gaming router.
Daniel Boddy
04/03/2024 – Why are gaming routers called gaming routers when none of them can run a video game? – This was a completely legitimate question asked by the creative experts at Kitten Labs, who thought boldly and started playing GTA on the 2013 TP-LINK TL-WDR4900 router.
Obviously, since 1993's Doom has already been ported to several impossible devices (most recently a toothbrush), we wouldn't be surprised if it was the first or second GTA with a WiFi router, not Vice City. Vice City is a lot more complex to start with such small tools, so Kittens Labos also needed minimal tinkering to make the TP-LINK router capable of running GTA.
First of all, a MiniPCIe connector was installed in the router so that the final result could also be displayed on the monitor, for which the built-in PowerPC e500v2 processor was not enough, they even used an external Radeon HD 7470 card. Next came the software fun, OpenWRT, Debian Linux, installing drivers – it was written in great detail in from their sidethen run GTA: Vice City ReVC (i.e. the original decrypted version) obtained from GitHub (still available despite TakeTwo's lawsuit).
The 22-year-old game works surprisingly well on TP-LINK, though it's nowhere near perfect. According to the guys, for example, if we wanted to interact with any NPC, all kinds of graphical aberrations would occur, making Vice City completely unplayable. Solution: The game world would have to be stripped down, which would lose its essence and essence, but – as a technological curiosity – at least it could be run from the router.
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