German hardware hacker gets GTA: Vice City running on router

GTA: Vice City running on router: In a blog post, KittenLabs, a German hardware hacker, describes how they were able to get the arcade classic Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to function flawlessly on a router. KittenLabs installed Debian Linux and GTA: Vice City on an odd hardware configuration consisting of a TP-Link TL-WDR4900 and an AMD Radeon HD 7470 linked as an eGPU. The installation went surprisingly successfully, as you can see in the video below.

GTA: Vice City running on router

This old-school gaming hack has a fascinating backstory. Since it was released in 2013, the TP-Link TL-WDR4900 Wi-Fi router has garnered notice due to its stellar performance reputation. According to KittenLabs, the NXP/Freescale QorIQ P1014 CPU, which powers the router, is really a 32-bit PowerPC e500v2.

It goes without saying that even a strong router lacks a PC GPU-friendly PCIe slot, thus installing an eGPU took some cunning. After severing PCIe traces that led from the CPU to one of the Atheros chipsets, KittenLabs created a custom miniPCIe breakout PCB and mounted it to the router. They acquired a functional spare PCIe 2.0 interface as a result.

Software fiddling

The next step involved some fiddling with software. After installing OpenWrt on the router, KittenLabs chose to bootstrap a version of Debian Linux with extra kernel modules enabled, sufficient for a gaming platform with AMD graphics driver compatibility, given OpenWrt’s clear limitations as a general-purpose OS.

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After encountering an incompatibility issue during early testing with an AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU, the system was able to function again after converting to a classic AMD Radeon HD 7470 card using an outdated driver.

The TL-WDR4900 had to pass a number of tests before it could be tested with GTA: Vice City. Getting a version of the game that will happily run on the Debian / PowerPC system was KittenLabs’ top priority.

The solution was found in reVC, a reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto Vice City that was developed for the router platform and whose source code is freely accessible. Unfortunately, there were still bugs in the game and it was hardly functional when using any NPCs. The project was delayed for several months as a result of this problem.

Wii U port of reVC online gave rise to fresh optimism, particularly after the creator aided KittenLabs. Still, there were problems with graphical corruption.

After updating the Mesa 3D graphics library, which the router uses as part of its Linux installation, the breakthrough was finally achieved. Next, updating several dependencies, this wasn’t easy, but “player rendering started to work fine on real hardware (with acceleration!)” after it was finished.

As the blog page and the video at the top demonstrate, this update, on the one hand, made the project a huge success. KittenLabs was a little displeased, though, as they were unsure of the precise method used to fix the earlier problems.

You should spend some time reading the KittenLabs blog. There are lots of other hacks, computing, vintage computing, and art-focused posts to peruse in addition to the recently released GTA: Vice City on a router post. The Analog Floppy Synthesizer, which uses 3.5-inch floppy drive hardware to play musical compositions, is one of our favorite old postings.