Hacker runs GTA: Vice City on his router, using an external AMD Radeon GPU

I can safely say I haven't seen this before: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City running on a router... not a gaming console, gaming portable, or a PC... but a router. Check it out:

Hackers "Manawyrm" and "tSYS" used a TP-Link WDR4900 which is pretty old, released in 2013, powered by a PowerPC e500v2 32-bit processor. These routers are old, but they're popular for modders and open-source network software, including OpenWrt, DD-WRT, and Tomato.

The router board itself has a bunch of connectivity options, but it doesn't feature a PCIe slot... which is where the hackers come in, manually adding the PCIe slot, and using it as an external GPU solution powered by the Radeon HD 7470 graphics card. The Mini PCIe slot had to be soldered to the board, an extension cable then connected to the external GPU, which then outputs the data onto the screen.

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GTA Vice City running on TP-Link router (source: KittenLabs)

The hackers originally planned to use a newer Radeon RX 570 graphics card, but there were driver issues preventing them from getting it up and running, switching out to the Radeon HD 7470. This has the Caicos GPU, with 160 shading units and just 1GB of GDDR5 memory, but it has enough GPU power to run Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

GTA Vice City running on TP-Link router (source: KittenLabs)

The older architecture run by the processor means a special version of GTA: Vice City had to be run, with the game being publicly reverse-engineered, compiled specially for the PowerPC processor. The hackers were successful when running the game with some Mesa 3D drivers, and a bunch of software magic.