Behold GoldenEye 007 with four screens – dream come true or travesty?
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Goldeneye 64 was the best bang for our buck of any game we ever bought. We did the same thing with Perfect Dark.
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.
The PS2 had something similar (only two consoles) but it used Firewire because Sony is the Apple of Japan.
I gave up on PS2 games because the first few I tried would say 2 or 4 or more players and too many times they meant "1 per PS2" without disclosing that ahead of time where xbox and GC reliably had splitscreen on pretty much any multiplayer game.
So it has no real online features but they were grafed on by a bunch of tricks.
We used to connect across the Atlantic to a host in the US, dude had a fat fibre pipe so 16 player Halo 2 with 0 lag and modded features (like spawning a warthog for each player in blood gulch for Cat vs. Mouse games.)
Fun times. Halo 3 iirc made some changes to the netstack to break it though :(
Not sure screen cheating would work very well against the sniper that can shoot through walls though.
One of my honest bigger complaints about newer first person shooters is that they round all that corners off the map. There's no good sniper nests.
In Halo Infinite anywhere you could reasonably snipe from is out of bounds. They give you a grappling hook, but don't let you go anywhere interesting with it in the multiplayer.
The game has a lot of tricks too as I recall. Grenade launcher grenades only explode when hitting the ground, not other surfaces, so if you know what you're doing you can kill someone half way across The Complex with one. Oh, and some guns can shoot through doors, but the door must be open(ing) for it to actually register the hit, otherwise it is just rendering a tracer. Stuff like that.
Perhaps someday I will have an opportunity to save the world with my license-to-kill, postols-only, Complex skills. Only then will my misspent youth make sense.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history
As another comment posted, that is the point of the game. It doesn't always work out that way with house rules people use (knowingly or not).
No, not the other board game
And then play for hours towards your inevitable victory.
But since the rules of the game only allow you to build if you have a monopoly, when a JV is formed, all owners should nominate one person and transfer their properties (within that monopoly) to that person, who then becomes the owner of the monopoly and can do with it as he wishes.
This leads to a lot of fun situations when there is conflict between the JV parties about the usage, or if the owner requires money for financing something else, and decides to 'backstab' the JV partners. Keeps the game entertaining for hours!
I would usually forfeit and leave whenever I wasn't first, and generally speaking so did anyone else.
We had some people who relied on screen cheating so much they refused to play with it.
It was weird how split the community was on screem cheating or not back then.
As luck would have it, those skills were a great advantage when playing games like Halo LAN parties where I was sharing the screen with my allies rather than enemies. A quick glance and I could gauge their location, situation, and how best to help them out.
ArsTechnica’s article includes more detail in how exactly they got this to work - it’s pretty great/disgusting.
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.
But you can keep the delay to a maximum of about half a frame (and an average of just over a quarter frame across the whole display). It requires driving the two bottom displays out of sync to the two top displays by half a screen.
You could do more with a small software modification on the n64, make it interleave the top two and bottom two images as alternating scanlines. That way while it's outputting the repeats for the top two, the n64 is scanning out the next line for the bottom two.
You mean the two bottom players would have a delay, right? They already have a half-screen delay.
You can avoid (additional) unequal treatment by adjusting the timings of the bottom two players so their TVs start scanning out the top line right after the n64 scans out it's middle line.
Child me is gonna be king of the playground
oh and only the "noobs" (as in, the younger of our group) could pick oddjob, because it was almost cheating.
The real controversy was over spawn rushing. Once you figured out exactly where and how close you could be to the next spawn dying just once put you at a large disadvantage. Ultimately that’s why we stopped playing, it would commonly end up like 10-3-0-0 and that was lousy for the 0’s.
- Pressing A + B activated a remote mine without switching to the watch
- If you put remote/proximity mines on ammo boxes, then picked up the ammo, the mine’s sprite would disappear when the ammo box respawned, but the mine would still actually be there
- Placing remote/proximity mines in the spawn locations
- If you already had full body armor and couldn’t pick up another, the best move was to blow it up so no one else could grab it for awhile
- The Magnum could shoot through various surfaces that other guns couldn’t (like the grates in front of the hiding spots in the Complex)
- Some of the guns could “shoot through” opening doors before they were actually open in the Temple
(Edit: line breaks)
When I played an n64 decades later I could not use southpaw anymore because years of playstation had got me accustomed to the regular layout.
[1]https://goldeneye.fandom.com/wiki/Control_style#Dual_Control...
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.
The screen splitters are almost certainly digital at the level you describe.
Some analog gear capable of this sort of thing did exist though.
As for output options:
The NES had composite video out, in addition to the RF out (which you most likely needed in that era, unless you had a fancy TV).
The SNES kept the RF out, but added a proprietary AV multi out connector. This exposes composite video (and stereo audio) at a minimum, and older models did S-VIDEO and RGB component as well (cut in later-production models to cut costs).
The N64 used the same multi-out connector, but RGB’s always unconnected on the N64 and S-VIDEO only works on NTSC models. And RF’s gone on the N64, so you needed a separate RF modulator if all your TV had was an antenna input.
I bet it has a lot more to do with them being avaible for cheap now because NOBODY cares except retro nerds. Back when they were actively being used, they were only in the realms of professional use as they were so damn expensive. Sony's professional monitors have average in the price range of $1000 per inch. Of course these are going to look good for retro gaming, they have way more resolution than the normal consumers had access.
As for "retro nerds", we are seeing a generation, who were last to use the CRT as kids, seek them now. They care, at least for a while. They want to pass their roots along to the next generation.
My own kids have asked about it, and I am gaming with my granddaughter on both a high end CRT and a very low hour consumer set that is just sweet for retro gaming. She is 6 and notices.
I also scored an awesome Disney VHS collection, that is basically the catalog plus a few notables, like Rugrats. Bright orange VHS tape, BTW. The reports are in!
She hates rewind. She likes all the noises and that the machine will take a tape and give it back to her when done playing. She did ask whether one says thank you.
Cute as all get out. I said her call, and she does thank it. "Thank you movie machine."
I happen to know a ton about TV's from the tube era, up through the 00's. Consumer circuits got really good near the end. The big difference was the CRT itself. One can connect a VGA tube to a consumer set and, for the most part, get a much higher resolution image. That was my first "PVM."
I agree with you on availability. The consumer grade sets are running strong. The reality is enjoying the pro grade gear is a real treat. The people modifying US sets to take RGB are going to put high quality within reach of many more people. And there are plenty of buyers.
A well aligned consumer set from the 00's will look great for gaming. In my opinion, the pro gear can deliver a bit better and or can handle signals from around the world. That's why I have mine. PAL viewing of games and movies is interesting and does explain a few differences in preferences I have seen between the EU and US.
Consumer gear and media sources really were crappy. In my case, I was not around pro gear much, but did see it some. I was good at electronics and would get consumer grade devices, sometimes swap tubes in, and other times optimize the device for the single purpose it would serve.
In the case of computer display, that might be adjusting everything to work well for a computer, but you might not want to watch a movie on it. Even some of the older tube type sets I worked with could perform reasonably, hitting 400 lines or so. Just enough to work with 80 column text reasonably, but not with excellence. At the time though, it was pretty nice compared to the default many people worked with.
The pro grade CRT market is crazy! When I got mine, it was essentially a giveaway. Got lucky too. Was a low hour unit that did not live on a primary production path.
That same model is selling for a few hundred bucks!
Workstation monitors are spiking now too, and in my opinion are the way to go. User gets to view a fine pitch tube and the circuits are fast, geometry consistent enough to not be a worry.
It remains possible to get in cheap, but damn! Bet that fades in about a year.
The N64 could output a composite signal, which looks great on the high end CRT. A NES can output composite, Genesis, SNES, all could. Pro CRT displays have great circuits and fine pitch tubes. SD content looks amazing.
The consumer grade sets had composite and better inputs growing more common in the late 80's, early 90's. They look good.
It was fun to get pro gear and look at what we all could have been watching! I had a consumer set that I tuned to peak capability and the tube being normal pitch was it's only real limitation. Really, it means 80 column text was hard. Gaming looked very good.
The NES had its modulator external to the unit. It did RF right at the TV for best performance. One could get composite right out of the system and that is what my kids gamed on.
Using high end gear with retro computing and gaming is a great experience! Recommended.
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.
They are using analog signal processing equipment, the latency is probably less than a ms.
And besides, ease up. It's someone nerding out with AV equipment not an attack on your ideals as a technologist.
Not true just select the 1.2 control mode and the c-buttons move and strafe and the stick will aim.
That said, Goldeneye, along with Perfect Dark, both have numerous alternative control options, one of them is using two gamepads, so you can have two analog stick and control it just like any modern shooter. N64 controller is pretty unique in being usable with only one hand.
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?
The point isn't how they did it, but that they did do it. Only on HN is the actual point lost.
Ie, you could use a webcam on a screen, and then cut it up using FFMPEG cropping, send each of them via an RTMP stream to a device... but then you have encoding + cropping + network latency.
Sucks for gaming.
you failed to mention the major hit in quality of videoing a CRT screen with a webcam. also, hope that webcam supports genlock as well as the CRT, otherwise, your h/v sync will never match.
and i thought i could come up with some zanny ideas. this one though, boy, i don't know.
Or this one for $150: https://www.amazon.com/Super-64-Nintendo/dp/B07TKF5XBS
You could also use an upscaler like the MClassic for $100: https://www.marseilleinc.com/mclassic/
Then you need a 1x4 HDMI splitter like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Controller-Splitter-Supportt1920x10...
It’s small money considering that the solution used in the article was an order of magnitude more expensive.
You’ll also need the console. An N64 console is going to cost you $100 on eBay, a GoldenEye cart another $20. You’re also going to need four controllers for about $20 each. And displays…
The key bit you need to get a digital signal is just $20 but you can pay more if you want and I linked such an option. The upscaler is entirely optional. The video splitter is the most expensive part but you’re really only looking at closer to $250 in extra gear to get this working in addition to the cost of the console, so yes, a few bucks.
I’ve my old N64 sitting in a box in the attic. I could imagine setting it up for some students to play at work.
So, why don't you just go ahead and spend those "few bucks" and do a nice little write up on the experience whether or not it was successful or not? It's just a few bucks after all
You didn’t question my idea, you were snarky and dismissive. You’ve made no attempt to qualify if my suggestion would work just made a value judgment on your perceived value of some cheap electronics.
what a waste of time
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.
Screen cheating is a skill, countering it is a skill, and countering THAT is an even bigger skill.
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.
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.
Forgot about the exploded boxes thing too! I haven’t played much 007 since pandemic. Still got the slime green n64 and such though.
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.
IIRC Goldeneye even had horizontal-axis auto-aim which helped.
You'll find the same in Quake, Quake 2, Doom, etc