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

TP-Link Router runs GTA Vice City
(Image credit: Manawyrm (YouTube))

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.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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