Forget Doom on a lawnmower or toothbrush, check out GTA: Vice City running on a TP-Link Wi-Fi router

Date:
Tue, 05 Mar 2024 14:49:51 +0000

Description:
Check out a real gaming router by which we mean one converted to be a gaming PC with some hardware trickery.

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Playing PC games on your Wi-Fi router and we dont mean online gaming via
your router, but actually using the router as a PC is not something you likely thought possible, but it very much is as a freshly aired project demonstrates.

As highlighted by Toms Hardware , a pair of enterprising hardware tinkerers based in Germany, Manawyrm and tSYS (known collectively as KittenLabs), ran GTA: Vice City on a TP-Link TL-WDR4900 router.

How on earth does that work? Well, routers have processors , and have done
for a long time (indeed this TP-Link model is over a decade old, in fact).
And with some enterprising hacking of the router, its possible to do some (limited) PC gaming using this routers PowerPC-based CPU, with the tricky bit being supplying the GPU.

Of course, you arent about to fit a graphics card inside a router, but you
can hook up an external GPU, which is exactly what was done with this
project.

As Manawyrm explains in a blog post , an AMD Radeon HD 7470 GPU was connected as an external GPU, with the connection being the difficult part as it was necessary to provide a PCIe slot for the graphics card.

That meant employing a mini PCIe breakout PCB and soldering it in, something of a complex endeavor. With a monitor hooked up to the Radeon card, and
Debian Linux as the OS, the gaming commenced (eventually, after some tricky work on the software front).

GTA: Vice City was demoed and runs decently enough, if a little slow. But
hey, come on this is a router being used as a PC. Check out the video below to see the game in action for yourself. Analysis: Were all Doomed (and GTAed)

We are by now familiar with Doom being run on all manner of weird and wonderful devices and gadgets such as a lawnmower (yes really, a smart model). And this is another one to file in that particular cabinet of unexpected but cool ways to use hardware that you never thought of gaming-wise. Just with a different game in this case to make a refreshing change.

Wondering why the Radeon HD 7470 was drafted in as the graphics card when its a hopelessly far cry from the best GPUs these days? Well, originally the hackers did attempt to get something more contemporary working with the TP-Link router, namely an AMD RX 570 graphics card (from 2017), but didnt
have any joy (due to compatibility issues with 32-bit platforms, they speculate). So, it was necessary to switch to the longer-in-the-tooth Radeon HD 7470.

All of this makes you wonder what oddity these boundary-breakers of the hardware tinkering world will come up with next. Doom on a toothbrush was an effort seen recently, too, as well as the aforementioned lawnmower. You might also like The best graphics card deals out there Top gaming PCs: great rigs for serious PC gaming Best PC games of 2024: must-play titles you don't want to miss



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/forget-doom-on-a-lawnmower-or-toothbrush-c heck-out-gta-vice-city-running-on-a-tp-link-wi-fi-router


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