This old WiFi router can run Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Two tech researchers at Kitten Labs have discovered that an old TP-Link WiFi router can be used as a gaming PC of sorts, running versions of Linux and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City when connected to an external AMD Radeon HD 7470 graphics card. I discovered.

The experiment, first spotted by The Verge, was published on Kitten Labs’ website and was also shared as a YouTube video on Sunday. In the video, the router is connected to a monitor, keyboard, and GPU via a series of cables.

The game powers on, your playable character hops into a vehicle, and you drive around town for a few minutes while the game’s music plays from external speakers. In particular, only the keyboard is used to play the game itself, and the arrow keys are used to navigate between game selection menus.

“Over the past few years, I’ve gotten really frustrated with companies advertising so-called ‘gaming routers.’ None of them will be able to run the game,” writes one of his modders, known as TobleMiner, on Mastodon.

The TP-LINK TL-WDR4900 router already includes a unique PowerPC CPU, was first released in 2013, and has a 36-bit address space. However, the router itself required some tweaking as Kitten Labs’ pseudonymous tester added a miniPCIe connection. The tester also installed an older graphics card driver for the connected Radeon HD 7470 card, as the new driver didn’t seem to be compatible with his 32-bit system.

After spending “several days patching the game,” Kitten Labs released a reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (known as ReVC) over the router, according to the post. He said he was able to execute it. Back in 2021, Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of GTA developer Rockstar Games, filed a lawsuit against the creators of older versions of reverse-engineered games, including Vice City. , Kitten Labs reports that the files are still publicly available.

Overall, Vice City seems to be running very smoothly, and considering it’s a router-based system, the graphics also seem stable. However, Kitten Labs points out that his GTA version of the router is limited. When you interact with non-playable characters in the game world, the game’s graphics flash different geometric shapes on the screen, making it virtually unplayable. However, you can run the game by playing it in a more empty world without NPCs.

But you don’t need any technical skills to enjoy the 2002 game again. In December, Netflix released mobile-friendly versions of older GTA games to its subscribers, bringing Grand Theft Auto 3, GTA San Andreas, and Vice City to the app store.