When it comes to installing games on unconventional hardware, Doom is the absolute king. However, some contenders want to take its crown, and one of the most notable is GTA: Vice City. The modders “Manawyrm” and “tSYS” from the KittenLabs portal decided to take this game and share the complete process with the community to run it on a TP-Link TL-WDR4900 v1 router, using Debian and an AMD Radeon graphics card…
Many gamers do not hesitate to accept extreme conditions to access certain titles. Minimum graphics, low resolution, modding… Personally, I have gone so far as to edit levels and delete objects in search of a few extra FPS. When hardware does not help, things can get very difficult, but some users see that limitation as a challenge.
And so we come to the KittenLabs portal, where its leaders “Manawyrm” and “tSYS” published a rather particular guide. First, they chose GTA: Vice City for their project, a game that already has more than twenty years on its shoulders. And second, the platform is a TP-Link TL-WDR4900 v1 WiFi router. Would you like to see it in action…?
GTA: Vice City on a TP-Link Router
The TP-Link TL-WDR4900 v1 was selected for a very special detail: Instead of using MIPS or ARM chips like those found in other similar models, this router has an NXP/Freescale QorIQ P1014 processor, basically a 32-bit PowerPC e500v2. There is a lot of performance in that silicon, and the Qualcomm/Atheros WiFi chipsets connect via PCI Express. One of the Atheros chips was disabled (by cutting the PCB traces) to connect a miniPCIe adapter, and with the help of an additional bridge, the router received an AMD Radeon HD 7470 graphics card.
On the software side we have Debian, and as for Vice City, the modders used the files from the reVC project, which improves the original game from every point of view. The biggest problem was adapting the code to run on a Big-endian platform, and after several updates (including a huge jungle of dependencies) to solve certain graphics errors, the game worked perfectly. If you want to know all the technical details, the link is below.
Official site: Click here
