A German hardware hacker by the name of KittenLabs has published ablog postabout how they managed to get the classic GTA: Vice City running smoothly on a router. Using an unusual hardware concoction of a TP-Link TL-WDR4900 and an AMD Radeon HD 7470 connected asan eGPU, KittenLabs managed to install Debian Linux and GTA: Vice City and it ran surprisingly well, as you can see in the video below.
The story behind this classic gaming hack is very interesting. The TP-Link TL-WDR4900 Wi-Fi router was singled out for attention as it has a reputation for great performance (for its release date of 2013). Central to the router’s performance is an NXP/Freescale QorIQ P1014 CPU which KittenLabs explains is actually a PowerPC e500v2 32bit processor.
Of course, even a powerful router doesn’t have a PC GPU-friendly PCIe slot, so some hackery was required to install an eGPU. KittenLabs designed a custom miniPCIe breakout PCB and attached it to the router after cutting PCIe traces leading from the CPU to one of the Atheros chipsets. This got them a working spare PCIe 2.0 interface.
Next, some software wrangling was required. KittenLabs installedOpenWrton the router but due to its obvious limits as a general-purpose OS decided to bootstrap a version of Debian Linux, with additional kernel modules enabled – enough for a gaming platform with AMD graphics driver support.
Initial experiments with anAMD Radeon RX 570GPU hit an incompatibility wall, but switching to a legacy AMD Radeon HD 7470 card with an older driver quickly paid dividends – the system started working.
There were many hurdles to overcome before the TL-WDR4900 could be tested running GTA: Vice City. Most pressingly, KittenLabs had to get a version of the game that would happily run on the Debian / PowerPC system. The answer lay in reVC (a reverse-engineered version of GTA Vice City, with the source code publicly available) which was compiled for the router platform. Sadly, the game was still just a shadow of its fully supported self, with glitches when any NPCs were involved. This issue caused the project to be stuck for several months.
AWii U portof reVC online sparked new hope, especially when the author helped KittenLabs. However, there were still graphical corruption issues…
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Finally, the breakthrough came after delivering an update to theMesa 3D graphics libraryused by the router as part of itsLinux installation. This wasn’t a breeze, as a number of dependencies to be updated as well, but once done “player rendering started to work fine on real hardware (with acceleration!).” On one hand, this update made the project a resounding success, as you can see from the video (top) and the blog page. However, KittenLabs was a little dissatisfied to not know exactly how the previous issues were resolved.
The KittenLabs blog is an interesting place to spend some time. As well as the new GTA: Vice City on arouterpost, there are plenty of other hacks, computing, retro computing, and art-focused posts to absorb. One of our favorite archived posts is theAnalog floppy synthesizerwhich plays musical compositions using 3.5-inchfloppy drivehardware.
Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
