Programmers from the KittenLabs project under the pseudonyms Manawyrm and tSYS turned the TP-Link TL-WDR490 home Wi-Fi router into a computer and launched the GTA: Vice City video game. In this respect reports Wccftech publication.
TP-Link TL-WDR4900 attracted the attention of programmers due to its reputation as a powerful device. The router was released in 2013, and its “heart” is the NXP/Freescale QorIQ P1014 chip, which is essentially a PowerPC e500v2 processor clocked up to 1.5GHz.
Although this chip had high performance, it was not enough on its own to run GTA: Vice City because this task required a graphics card. As a result, KittenLabs enthusiasts connected an external GPU to the TL-WDR4900 in the form of AMD Radeon HD 7470. To do this, Manawyrm and tSYS used a miniPCIe card, which provides the system with the necessary PCIe 2.0 interface.
Initially enthusiasts used OpenWrt as a software platform, but it performed poorly as a general-purpose operating system, so in the end the choice fell on Debian Linux. Not the first time, but the KittenLabs team still managed to connect a video card: at first they wanted to connect an AMD Radeon RX 570, but due to problems they had to settle on the already mentioned Radeon HD 7470.
Eventually, Manawyrm and tSYS began searching for a GTA: Vice City build suitable for PowerPC processors. It turned out that this was not available, so enthusiasts had to compile the appropriate version themselves.
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