Playing PC games on your Wi-Fi router – and we don’t 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 Tom’s 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, it’s possible to do some (limited) PC gaming using this router’s PowerPC-based CPU, with the tricky bit being supplying the GPU.
Of course, you aren’t 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: We’re all Doomed (and GTA’ed)
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 it’s 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 didn’t 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.