Grand Theft Auto Vice City Can Be Played On A Wireless Router

Recently, a couple of German-based tech enthusiasts Manawyrm and tSYS under the name KittenLabs have demonstrated their new project, a modified TP-Link wireless router capable of running Debian Linux and video games.

According to KittenLabs, this setup includes a TP-Link wireless router, with an external AMD Radeon GPU connected via PCIe. The developers explained the choice of using the unique TP-Link WDR4900 model as it features a PowerPC-based CPU, offering a full 36-bit address space, a lot of performance, and excellent PCIe controllers.

On their blog, KittenLabs revealed a detailed step-by-step process for making this gaming router and shared solutions for the problems they faced along the way.

At first, KittenLabs went with OpenWrt, however, this didn't work out for multiple reasons and developers decided to install Debian Linux, as it was perfectly compatible with this type of CPU. Next, it turned out that AMD Radeon RX 570 has some sort of incompatibility with 32-bit platforms hence the choice was to use the older Radeon HD 7470 card that proved to be working just fine.

As their next step, KittenLabs needed to compile reVC, a reverse-engineered version of GTA Vice City, with the source code publicly available. They spent a few days patching the game to work correctly on big-endian machines as there were over 100 mechanisms in the source code that had to be patched. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough as the game had some serious player model glitching issues and the project was abandoned for several months since the team couldn't figure out the problem.

Luckily, an author of a reVC Wii U port was kind enough to share their patched source code with KittenLabs and the project got back on track. A number of dependencies had to be updated as well and the team was finally able to run Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the router with no issues.

Read the KittenLabs blog post for more details and check out their other cool projects. Don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.