Hey everyone,
So, I was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping and thought I scored a deal on a Nintendo Switch for my nephew. Turns out, I didn’t read the description carefully enough, and I ended up with a NETGEAR 16-Port Gigabit Ethernet Managed Switch.
To be fair, it does look like a futuristic game console.
After some initial panic, I’ve decided to just keep it. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll pivot into the hotel business and need to save on network infrastructure costs. Gotta think long-term, right?
You accidentally lucked into correctness.
You’ve never played as fun a game of space invaders as when you’re arbitrarily shooting down network packets and forcing TCP into over time.
A bit unrelated, but if you have DD-WRT on WiFi router with USB, you can install Entware. There’s also a few games.
I used to play Tetris (vitetris) on my old WiFi router. I also tried to compile doom_ascii for MIPS, but I wasn’t successful and gave up. That was 5 months ago, so I basically forgot everything I tried already.
I have also tried to compile it directly on the WiFi router, but it kept crashing even when I killed all running services (including SSH and Telnet so I had to use console, at least it’s 115,200 baud) that weren’t necessary. I think 32MB of RAM was my problem.
Anyway, I doubt it would run on it anyway, but at least I tried.
List of games available (at least for MIPS): angband, cavezofphear, crawl, gnuchess, minesweep-rs, nethack, rcon, sudoku-tui, superstartrek, tty-solitaire, vitetris, zork.
Edit: Hmm, it seems at least very few Netgear switches may be supported by OpenWRT (e.g.: https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/gs308t_1). Maybe there is potential to actually play games on that switch!
You had me at nethack - I wonder if you could run the rendering engine (aka message visibility and customization) for a mud just by exploiting packet forwarding on a switch. That sounds like an interesting tinkering project.