Museum rigs up multi-screen N64 GoldenEye to prevent “screencheating”

If you played GoldenEye 007 on the N64, you probably remember having to account for the screen cheaters in order to gauge an opponent's location. A modern game forces players to rely on the tactic to track invisible opponents.

25 years after the launch of GoldenEye, a museum has figured out a way to split the game across four TV screens without modifying the original 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 is posted on the computer museum's website.

The multi-screen GoldenEye game will be featured at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England this weekend. Ars reached out for more details on how the museum pulled it off after seeing a proof of concept for the unique playstyle.

"It's not elegant"

Centre for Computing History CEO and trustee Jason Fitzpatrick tells Ars the idea for multi-screen GoldenEye started when some employees at the museum were discussing their particular frustrations with split-screen first-person shooters on consoles. "We were talking about it and they said, 'The trouble is being all on the same screen; you just look to the top right and see what they're doing, and you can counter it,'" Fitzpatrick said. "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." Advertisement

Fitzpatrick had a good job at Pure Energy TV and Film Props, where he would often be called on to set up old cathode ray tube TVs on set. He said that he has a number of bits of equipment for messing around with video.

The C2-7210 video scaler is a piece of video production tech that lets professionals process a live video signal in a wide variety of ways. 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 is included.

Fitzpatrick 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 part of the signal and send it to different TVs. The N64 full-screen signal is sent directly to the second input on one of those TVs to make it easier to navigate.

It is not elegant in that you take a

The original game didn't look great anyways, and the continuous horizontal line- scanning tech of the CRTcovers up a lot of sins.

This kind of signal splitting may remind you of the huge video walls that are found in art installations and old music videos. It would take hours to set up a video wall controller for this kind of processing. It would have taken the screen and cut it in half. It might have missed some things.