Museum rigs up multi-screen N64 GoldenEye to prevent ?screencheating?

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.Enlarge / The C2-7210 video scaler is the key bit of tech for splitting GoldenEye's split-screen across multiple displays.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. Since we were already going to have split-screen multiplayer, and the multiplayer gameplay was already designed to work in that situation, it seemed obvious to also allow split-screen multiplayer when networked!"The great thing is, it would have allowed groups of friends who in the '90s had gone round to each other's houses and huddled around a single TV, but had now maybe "grown up" (is that possible for gamers?), got jobs in other parts of the country/world and moved apart, to re-experience the same fun times from the past, but now over the Internet."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.