Anyone who remembers playing Golden eyes 007 On the N64 he probably remembers having to report this “screen cheat” that would peek at another quarter of the split-screen shooter to gauge opponent’s positions. There is even a modern game which forces players to rely on tactics to keep up with invisible opponents.
Now, 25 years later golden eyeA museum has managed to do something about these on-screen cheats, by coming up with a way to split a game golden eye to four TV screens without modifying the original cartridge or N64.
4 GoldenEye screens on the original N64 hardware! There is no cheat screen here! …but how?
Come try it out at the GoldenEye party, celebrating 25 years of GoldenEye for the Nintendo 64: https://t.co/F918hEQ20v pic.twitter.com/05jA82upb8Computer history May 4, 2022
Multiple screens golden eye The gameplay will be shown as part of the “25 Years of ” file golden eyeAn event at the Cambridge, England Center for Computing History this weekend. Proof of concept for unique gameplay (all screens awkwardly facing the same direction) He drew attention with a tweet on WednesdayThis prompted Ars to request more details about how the museum succeeded in removing it.
“Not elegant”
CEO and Director of the Center for Computing History Jason Fitzpatrick told Ars about the idea of multiple screens golden eye It began when some museum employees were discussing their own frustrations with first-person shooters split into consoles. “We were talking about it and they said, ‘The problem is that they’re all on the same screen; You just look at the top right and you see what they’re doing, and you can face it,” Fitzpatrick said. And we were like, ‘Oh, actually, we might have a way around this. We just fiddled with it and I tried it and thought it was kind of fun.”
Fitzpatrick was in a good position to break up golden eyeOf the split-screen signal due to his day-to-day work on film and TV accessories, he says he is often called upon to mount older CRT TVs on the set. This means it has “a number of equipment for video play,” he said.
In this case, the key to “small hardware” is the C2-7210 video scaler, an old video production technology that allows professionals to process the live video signal in various ways. This includes the ability to zoom in on a specific portion of up to two input signals, and then scale the result to a full screen output on another monitor or TV.
for multiple screens golden eyeFitzpatrick said he just split the standard PAL N64 signal into four mirrors, then feeds two inputs into two metering units. Then, you route each scaler to a different quarter of the input signal and send the resulting output to different TVs. The second entry on one of these TVs also receives an unmodulated full screen signal directly from the N64 for easy menu navigation.
“It’s not elegant in that you take 704 x 576 [pixel] You zoom in on a quarter and then you take that quarter and stretch it to full screen, Fitzpatrick told Ars. “Although we are dealing with something around 352 x 288 [pixels]More or less, as a resolution for each of these quadrants, when viewed in full screen, everything looks fine. “
That’s partly because “the original game wasn’t great anyway” and because CRT’s continuous horizontal line scanning technology “covers many sins,” Fitzpatrick said. “The old DVDs were 352×288 anyway, so we’re used to watching movies in that resolution,” he added.
This type of signal splitter can remember huge CRT video walls that you sometimes see in art installations or old music videos. But Fitzpatrick says that using a video wall controller for this type of treatment “would take hours to set it up because you would have to do each one separately… you didn’t have the exact control to go into that exactly. [split-screen] District. He would simply take the screen and cut it in half. He might have missed a few pieces.”