Anyone who remembers playing GoldenEye 007 on the N64 likely remembers having to account for the "screencheaters" that would glance at another quadrant of the split-screen shooter to gauge an opponent's locations. There's even a modern game that forces players to rely on the tactic to track invisible opponents.
Now, 25 years after GoldenEye's launch, a museum has managed to do something about those screencheaters, rigging up a way to split a game of GoldenEye across four TV screens without modifying the original cartridge or N64 hardware.
4 screen GoldenEye on the original N64 hardware! No screencheating here! …but how?
Come and experience this at our GoldenEye evening, celebrating 25 years of GoldenEye for Nintendo 64: https://t.co/F918hEQ20v pic.twitter.com/05jA82upb8— Computing History (@computermuseum) May 4, 2022
The multi-screen GoldenEye gameplay will be featured as part of the "25 Years of GoldenEye" event at Cambridge, England's Centre for Computing History this weekend. A proof of concept for the unique playstyle (with all the monitors awkwardly facing the same direction) attracted some attention via a tweet Wednesday, leading Ars to reach out for more details on how the museum pulled it off.
"It's not elegant"
Fitzpatrick was in a good position to split up GoldenEye's split-screen signal because of his day job at Pure Energy TV and Film Props, where he says he's often called on to set up old cathode ray tube TVs on set. That means he "happens to have a number of bits of equipment for messing around with video," he said.
In this case, the key "bit of equipment" is a C2-7210 video scaler, a defunct piece of video production tech that lets professionals process a live video signal in a wide variety of ways. That includes the ability to zoom in on a specific portion of up to two input signals and then upscale the result to a full-screen output on another monitor or TV.
For multi-screen GoldenEye, Fitzpatrick said he simply split the standard PAL N64 signal into four identical copies, then fed two inputs each into two scaler units. After that, you point each scaler at a different quadrant of the input signal and send the resulting output to different TVs. A second input on one of those TVs also receives the unmodified full-screen signal directly from the N64 to make it easier to navigate menus.
"It's not elegant in that basically you're taking a 704×576 [pixel] image, and you're just zooming into a quarter of it and then taking that quarter and stretching it across a full screen," Fitzpatrick told Ars. "Even though we're dealing with something around 352×288 [pixels], give or take, as a resolution for each one of those quadrants, by the time it's pulled up to full screen it looks all right."
That's partly because "the original game didn't look great anyway" and because the continuous horizontal line-scanning tech of the CRT "covers up a multitude of sins," Fitzpatrick said. "Old video CDs were 352×288 anyway, so we used to watch films at that resolution," he added.
This kind of signal splitting may bring to mind the massive CRT video walls that you sometimes see in art installations or old music videos. But Fitzpatrick says using a video wall controller for this kind of processing "would take hours to set up because you'd have to do each one individually... you wouldn't have had the fine control over going exactly into that [split-screen] area. That would have just took the screen and cut it into four. It might have missed some bits and pieces."
If you don't happen to have a few CRT TV scalers lying around, as Fitzpatrick does, then mimicking his setup could set you back quite a bit. Used C2-7210 video processors are currently listed on eBay for anywhere from about $500 to $1,000, and you need two units for a four-screen split. Fitzpatrick says he's seen similar units listed for up to $8,000 on secondhand sites.
Getting four CRT televisions for the setup isn't as easy as it once was, either. "It used to be that CRTs were next to nothing; we could pick them up for nothing," Fitzpatrick said. "Now all of a sudden every time you see a listing for a CRT it's got 'retro gaming' in brackets next to it on eBay." That's true even if the display doesn't have the RGB inputs that many retro gaming enthusiasts laud for providing the best and most authentic color and sharpness on classic titles. "You stick 'retro gamer' on the end of it and suddenly you've got a lot of money," Fitzpatrick said.
The way it was meant to be played?
In a way, this weekend's multi-screen GoldenEye exhibition is a high-tech version of physical screen-hiding tactics many players rigged up on their single TVs in the '90s. "A number of people have said when they visited the museum, 'Oh, I remember with my brother just putting a piece of cardboard or something down the middle, a sheet, whatever,'" Fitzpatrick said. "There are a lot of crazy ways you could do it to block each other out. So yeah, the idea is not new."
But while many may see a multi-monitor GoldenEye as an improvement, some say the modification messes with the game as it was designed to be played. "A couple of people online said, 'Well, you're actually taking away from the gameplay... I think somebody said it was like a game of chess; you've got to see what they're doing and then counter it. In some ways, they've said we're taking away from it, and yeah, they're probably right."
"I'm no good at it anyway, so it doesn't make any difference to me," Fitzpatrick continued. "It's not that it's better or worse, it's just different. It's not a way you could have done it before, and it's not a way you would do it again probably, because of the cost involved. But it's a bit of fun; it's nothing more than that."
Though Fitzpatrick and his fellow employees are looking forward to showing off their setup at the special event this weekend, there are currently no plans to make multi-screen GoldenEye a permanent part of the museum. "I need the equipment back after that anyway," Fitzpatrick said.
Listing image by Sam Machkovech / Rare / MGM / Evan Amos
Museum rigs up multi-screen N64 GoldenEye to prevent “screencheating” - Ars Technica
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