A GTA fan has managed to get GTA Vice City up and running on a broadband router of all things to game on. Following in the footsteps of Doom being playable on a smart fridge among other devices, Vice City is another classic getting put on everything it can.
First reported by Tom’s Hardware, hacker KittenLabs shared a write up and video on how they got GTA Vice City running on a TP-Link router.
How is this possible?
What KittenLabs did was select the TP-Link TL-WDR4900 wireless router due to its PowerPC-based CPU. The reason being is it offers a fair amount of processing power for its price and age plus has “excellent PCIe controllers.”
They then fitted a custom miniPCIe breakout PCB to the router via a copper wire. Following this, Debian Linux was installed on the router. Newer AMD GPU drivers don’t work so an older install had to be used.
To run GTA Vice City on the TP-Link, reVC had to be used. This is the reverse-engineered version of GTA VC. During the first attempt to get it running on the router happened, the game suffered lots of graphical issues.
Interestingly, turning off all NPCs fixed it. But then it isn’t Vice City anymore. Furthermore, a WiiU port of reVC by GaryOderNichts was used but suffered the same fate.
Speaking of reVC, this creators of this project were sued by Take-Two Interactive for reverse-engineering. You can learn more about that story here.
GTA Vice City successfully running on a broadband router
KittenLabs did not give up though. With perseverance by trying various updates to graphics packages, the game was up and running on the router without the aforementioned graphical issues. It might run had a less than stellar frame rate but the fact it is possible regardless is an incredible achievement.
You can check out the full video of GTA Vice City in action on the router here. It’s cool to see what fun people can do with devices and their skills. We’d highly recommend checking out the full write up by KittenLabs. Despite a lot of technical info, it is really impressive to see all of the steps and challenges faces to get this project over the line.
In recent times, Rockstar Games and Netflix brought the classic GTA Trilogy in its Definitive Edition form to mobile phones. Check out more details on these portable remasters here.
GTA V on Switch?
I wonder if one day we could see GTA V running on all kinds of unexpected devices if the power gets there. Last year, a fan got GTA V running on the Nintendo Switch and the results were as most would expect. Still, it is certain worth taking a look at here.
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