Museum prepares multi-screen N64 GoldenEye to prevent ‘screen cheating’

Anyone who remembers playing Golden eyes 007 On the N64 it will probably remember having to calculate “Cinema” It would take a look at another quarter of the split-screen shooter to gauge the opponent’s positions. So that there modern game which forces players to rely on tactics to track down invisible opponents.

Now, 25 years later golden eyeUpon its release, the Museum was able to do something about these filmmakers, setting up a way to split a game golden eye across four TV screens without modifying the original cartridge or N64.

4 GoldenEye screen on original N64 hardware! There is no cheat screen here! …but how?
Come and try this out at GoldenEye Evening, celebrating 25 years of GoldenEye for the Nintendo 64: https://t.co/F918hEQ20v pic.twitter.com/05jA82upb8

– history of computing (computermuseum) May 4, 2022

Multiple screens golden eye The gameplay will appear as part of 25 years of golden eye” It happened in Cambridge, England Computing History Center End of this week. Proof of concept for unique gameplay (all screens awkwardly facing the same direction) You grabbed some attention with a Wednesday tweetprompting Ars to reach out for more details on how the museum would pull it off.

“not elegant”

Zoom / C2-7210 video scaler is an essential part of technology for splitting golden eyeSplit screen across multiple displays.

Center for Computing History CEO and Trustee Jason Fitzpatrick Ars tells the idea of ​​multiple screens golden eye It began when some of the museum’s staff were discussing their own frustrations with split-screen first-person shooters on consoles. We were talking about it and they said, ‘The problem is you’re all on the same screen,’ said Fitzpatrick. Just look up right to see what they’re doing, and you can face it.” And we went, “Oh, actually, we might have a way around that.” So we just messed around and tried it and thought it was just a bit of fun.”

Fitzpatrick was in a good position to break up golden eyesplit screen signal due to his daily function in Pure Energy TV & Film أجهزة, where he says he is often called upon to set up old cathode ray tube televisions in the set. That means he “had a number of pieces of equipment to tamper with the video,” he said.

In this case, the key to “Part of Equipment” is C2-7210 Video Scaler, is a finished piece of video production technology that allows professionals to process a live video signal in a variety of ways. This includes the ability to amplify a specific portion of up to two input signals and then scale up the result to full screen output on another monitor or TV.

for multiple screens golden eyeFitzpatrick said he simply broke up Standard PAL N64 Signal into four mirrors, then insert two inputs into two scaler 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 easier menu navigation.

“It’s not elegant in that you take 704 x 576 [pixel] You zoom in on a quarter and then take that quarter and stretch it across an entire screen,” Fitzpatrick told Ars. “Although we’re dealing with something around 352 x 288 [pixels], give or take, as a solution to each one of these quadrants, by the time it’s pulled to full screen, it looks just fine. “

That’s partly because the “original game wasn’t great anyway” and because of that CRT الأفقي Horizontal Line Continuous Scanning Technology It covers up many sins, said Fitzpatrick. “The old DVDs were 352×288 anyway, so we’re used to watching movies in that resolution,” he added.

This kind of signal splitting might bring to mind Huge CRT Video Walls That you sometimes see in art installations or old music videos. But Fitzpatrick says use video wall console For this kind of processing “it would take hours to set up because you would have to do each one individually… you didn’t have the granular control going into that exactly [split-screen] space. That would have taken the screen and divided it into four. Maybe she missed some bits and pieces.”