Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Running on a Wi-Fi Router Defies All Expectations, Yet It’s Happening

Mar 5, 2024 at 06:56am EST
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

We are used to seeing the original Doom run on pretty much any electronic devices, but we have hardly seen games as complex as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City run on anything other than actual gaming devices. Until today, that is.

A new video shared by Manawyrm on YouTube shows the classic entry in the open-world series by Rockstar Games running on a TP-Link TL-WDR4900 v1 Wi-Fi router. What made this router capable of running the game is its PowerPC-based CPU which offers a full 36bit address space, a lot of performance for a router and excellent PCIe controllers, which allow an AMD Radeon GPU to be connected. Performance is not that smooth for obvious reasons, but what has been accomplished is still mighty impressive.

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The entire process to make Grand Theft Auto: Vice City run on this router was also documented in full in a blog post available here. This is an incredibly interesting read, so make sure to check it out to learn more about all the hard work that went into this project.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was recently remastered by Rockstar Games, but the official remaster was so disappointing that some fans have taken it upon themselves to modernize the game properly. Alongside an RTX Remix mod that introduces path tracing, a Nextgen Edition is currently in the works to remake the game using GTA V's Rage Engine.

About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.

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