[HN Gopher] Behold GoldenEye 007 with four screens - dream come ... ___________________________________________________________________ Behold GoldenEye 007 with four screens - dream come true or travesty? Author : Tomte Score : 79 points Date : 2022-05-06 14:31 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.theverge.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com) | fernandotakai wrote: | playing goldeneye with 4 players is such an amazing memory from | my childhood. the screen cheating screams were constant -- to the | point where we (as in, my group of friends) decided that screen | peaking was worth an arm punch (without retaliation). and the | group would judge if the offender was screen peaking or not! | | oh and only the "noobs" (as in, the younger of our group) could | pick oddjob, because it was almost cheating. | jonplackett wrote: | Totally invented this in 1997 with a cross shaped piece of | cardboard stuck to the TV screen. Radars off too for extra | jumpiness. | dannyfraser wrote: | No radar, auto-aim off, license to kill, pistols, go! | jonplackett wrote: | I was hoping this was going to be the announcement that it's | coming to the Switch N64 emulator | voidfunc wrote: | Doubt that would ever happen. Probably a licensing nightmare | since Microsoft owns Rare now plus whatever licensing issues | they would have with the Bond franchise holders. | lelandfe wrote: | https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/how-to-play-multiplay... | | ArsTechnica's article includes more detail in how exactly they | got this to work - it's pretty great/disgusting. | dehrmann wrote: | You'd have to do some buffering, but I guess you could "just" | (this is way easier with digital tech) buffer scanlines, send | the first half of it to one screen, the second have to another | at half speed, and replay the line for the next scanline? | What's nice is you don't have to buffer a full frame to do | this, so there wouldn't be a frame of lag. | Nextgrid wrote: | I wish they'd change the link to this as it contains more | technical details. | | Edit: nevermind, shame that you can't flag your own comments | for moderator attention. I know I can email but I feel like | it's not important enough to warrant one. | codingkoi wrote: | My siblings and I would tape a monopoly board to the TV to split | it vertically and then play team games to get around "screen | cheating". I think it had the best of both worlds. We were still | in the same room but we could ambush and sneak up on each other. | Definitely less expensive than this solution. | | Goldeneye 64 was the best bang for our buck of any game we ever | bought. We did the same thing with Perfect Dark. | 14 wrote: | I was going to mention Perfect Dark. Probably my favourite game | to this day. So many good wasted childhood hours playing this | game. | stevesearer wrote: | I loved Perfect Dark but never completed the game as my | system would always freeze due to the number of explosions | during the last level's boss battle. Even with the expansion | memory pack thing. | RileyJames wrote: | Yep, remember doing that once or twice in halo 1. | | Ultimately, screen cheating is a feature. | | Halo worked well as the pistol (starting weapon) is all you | really need. So there's no massive disadvantage on spawn. | | I remember playing online 2v2 (halo on xbox, there was no | online so it was actually system link, lan, run over the | network. Bloody hard work from Australia) in which screen | cheating is most definitely a feature. | | Nothing more bonding for two brothers to duke it out 1v1, and | then discover you're leagues ahead of everyone online in 2v2. | udp wrote: | We used to position the TV such that it was split between two | bunks of a bunk bed. One player below and one player above. | aunty_helen wrote: | Perfect dark was such a great game. Heaps of innovative | concepts. | | Not sure screen cheating would work very well against the | sniper that can shoot through walls though. | fernandotakai wrote: | the second mode on all weapons made perfect dark absurdly | unique. the laptop gun was super fun and innovative. | megablast wrote: | Screen cheating is a valid form of play though. You have to be | good to know where someone is by quickly looking at their | screen. | noobermin wrote: | 18 year old me would say "only noobs think this" | ddingus wrote: | Yup. Knew those layouts cold. People knew | willismichael wrote: | That's incredible. Somebody actually found a genuinely | enjoyable use of a monopoly board. | voidfunc wrote: | I like Monopoly, but this made me laugh. | willismichael wrote: | Thanks. My problem with Monopoly is that I always feel like | about 10 or 15 minutes into the game it is clear who the | winner will be, and then the next two hours are a slow | grind in which everybody else slowly becomes dust. | [deleted] | ddingus wrote: | Awesome! | | I wanted to do that forever. Never had the hardware, but being | around media people meant I knew it was possible. | | Dream come true, in my view! | | All that killer analog gear being tossed and this happens. | | Now I just want to play, maybe perfect dark too. | | To avoid screen cheating, I liked to drop the proximity mines in | PD and keep moving. Effective enough they were banned from family | play, lol. | findalex wrote: | Pro tip: A+B will detonate a remote-mine (no need to switch to | the watch). | IntelMiner wrote: | Time to rent a time machine and go back 25 years | | Child me is gonna be king of the playground | jpgvm wrote: | We do what we must because we can. | arielweisberg wrote: | Didn't even know screen cheating was a thing. That is just how | the game was played. No player is at a disadvantage. | crtasm wrote: | There's even a game named after the term where everyone is | invisible so you _have_ to look at the other player 's screens: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencheat | dehrmann wrote: | It's cheating in the same way looking at the community cards is | in hold 'em; it's part of the game. | basedgod wrote: | stock n64 goldeneye is unplayable garbage | | https://youtu.be/ziUMJB3id8I | | what a waste of time | ironSkillet wrote: | Of course it doesn't hold up to modern standards 25 years | later. But at the time it was released, it was considered | outstanding and revolutionary. I mean c'mon, you could shoot | guards in the groin and they would slowly fall to the ground | clutching their junk in agony. | ericlewis wrote: | Indeed a large appeal was the technical marvel of have a 4 | person split screen game of such magnitude. Very different | from the relative simplicity of Mario kart. | | Edit: it also bothers me that despite our progress on all | technological fronts we still get halo as the best split | screen fps experience. | | Edit 2: also still love playing OG 007 with friends who come | over because if you didn't figure out how to prevent screen | cheating you never learned how to actually play. | dannyfraser wrote: | Oh that last point! My friends and I used to just strafe | along every single wall and all you could see was the wall | texture until it was time to shoot. We knew all the levels | so well that just the changes in lighting, or sometimes how | quickly a door opened, were enough for us to tell where | someone else was (avoid the coloured corridors in Complex). | | Screen cheating is a skill, countering it is a skill, and | countering THAT is an even bigger skill. | fernandotakai wrote: | you could should their hats without damaging the guards! | (which was great on facility (aka second mission) -- you | could shot the hat out of a guard that was using the | bathroom). | ericlewis wrote: | The game being hard was part of the appeal. It took skill. | Maybe arguably dumb skill on the wrong areas - but skill. I'm | not impressed that modernizing and switching the input methods | made it "better" because my respect for them as a player will | still come from how well they can do hobbled in the same way as | myself. | | Edit: one such strategy is using odd job, the most derided of | strategies because you were basically taking advantage of how | difficult it was to use the Z axis. Screen cheating was | generally not that big a deal because you could do it just as | well as anyone else. It was more so "honor in doing so" that | was a problem. | hombre_fatal wrote: | Oddjob was what we made the winner-goes-on play as in my | circle of friends because his head is at headshot level. You | headshot him by just firing from the hip. | | Jaws, on the other hand, was taller than everyone so everyone | had to aim up at your head, and you could get headshots on | everyone else without moving the reticle. | | Offjob's true advantage, at least for us, was that he could | hide inside exploded boxes and he could counter Jaws. | ericlewis wrote: | I forgot about jaws height! It often depended on who had | unlocked what I suppose (different friends at different | stages, for proper competition we always had the cart with | everything and cheats) But odd job was definitely off | limits - I think he was actually slightly _under_ headshot | range. But easy enough adjustment I guess. | | Forgot about the exploded boxes thing too! I haven't played | much 007 since pandemic. Still got the slime green n64 and | such though. | hombre_fatal wrote: | I haven't played in 15 years but I think you're right. | | When Oddjob was close, you would have to quicktap C-up | instead of C-down to get a headshot on him while you were | strafing around. But once he was 10+ meters away, you | didn't have to adjust aim at all. | | Meanwhile, when Jaws was close, you'd have to even | double-tap C-down to aim at his head. And even far away | you'd only get body shots without adjusting aim. Which is | also the disadvantage that Oddjob has trying to shoot | everyone else in the game, thus we never considered him | much of an advantage since he will mainly get bodyshots | on other players. | | Frankly this is good PhD paper territory. | nick_ wrote: | Wait you can fire from the hip in goldeneye? | ericlewis wrote: | Yes. I'd argue zooming was less likely, the AK47 that | looked like a bottle of Chianti and you sprayed | everywhere being a good example. It was really hard to | try and use the aiming mode but key to levels (I forget | exact name) where it's a maze that people can end up on | different stories. The one with all the hidden doors is | what I'm referring to. | ericlewis wrote: | Perhaps it didn't look like it was from the hip - but for | all intents and purposes it was. Holding down the Z | button and aiming with the joystick was "down the | sights". I don't recall if accuracy differs much in | either scenario but the Z button version definitely did | differ in accuracy when you were panic-shooting. | hombre_fatal wrote: | I just mean shooting the gun without holding R to make | the reticle appear. | | IIRC Goldeneye even had horizontal-axis auto-aim which | helped. | causality0 wrote: | _No screencheating here!_ | | _puts the screens in a row so you can still screen cheat_ | | Sigh. | | _That means he "happens to have a number of bits of equipment | for messing around with video," he said._ | | This is an important line. It was done this way because they had | the equipment on hand, not that they think it's a good solution | for anyone else. The bit about replicating their setup is just | the author being dumb. You could do this with fifty bucks in | capture and output equipment. | Khoth wrote: | That's just for the video showing it off, they say when people | are playing it for real they'll arrange the screens facing away | from each other | argsnd wrote: | Seems like a lot of the cheapest ways to do this might | introduce significant latency though. | goldenkey wrote: | https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/how-to-play- | multiplay... | | They are using analog signal processing equipment, the | latency is probably less than a ms. | drewtato wrote: | This isn't the cheap way. Cheap way is converting it to | digital and re-outputting it in 4 separate hdmi/vga | displays. | legalcorrection wrote: | $10,000 to split a video signal into quarters? They got fleeced. | | And how is this even a story? They took a video signal and split | it into quarters. What am I supposed to be surprised or impressed | by? | ericlewis wrote: | I was sitting here thinking the same thing. You could probably | achieve this with an rpi or two. The article is light on | technical details unless I totally missed it.. | knolan wrote: | I would imagine you could do it easily with a HDMI mod and some | edid dongles for a few bucks. | paulryanrogers wrote: | It's a museum so reusing CRTs and their low latency is probably | part of the appeal. | djur wrote: | Yeah, the Ars Technica article makes it clear that this is a | temporary use of hardware they already had on hand, and the | $10k is just an estimate of what it would cost to buy this | vintage hardware online today. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-08 23:00 UTC)