A museum ended GoldenEye screencheating by zooming each quadrant onto its own TV

Ars Technica reported in May 2022 that the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England had rigged a four-screen GoldenEye 007 for a '25 Years of GoldenEye' event, without modifying the cartridge or N64. CEO Jason Fitzpatrick said staff were discussing split-screen shooters, where you just look at a corner and see what an opponent is doing, and realised they might have a way round it.

Fitzpatrick, who works at Pure Energy TV and Film Props setting up old CRT TVs, already owned video gear. He split the standard PAL N64 signal into four identical copies and fed two into each of two C2-7210 scalers. Each scaler zooms into a different quadrant and upscales it to full screen on its own TV, and one TV also receives the unmodified signal for menus.

He admits 'it's not elegant': each quadrant is roughly 352x288 pixels stretched up, but it looks all right on CRTs, which hide a multitude of sins. A video wall controller would have taken hours to set up and given less fine control.

The scaler can zoom any chosen region of a signal to full screen, so it does the split.

Copying the signal means the console and cartridge never need to know.

CRT scan lines and the game's low-resolution art hide the stretching.

Video wall controllers can't aim precisely at a quadrant.

Old broadcast equipment can fix a game design flaw outside the game itself, leaving the original hardware untouched.

The proof of concept spread on social media and was shown at the museum's event that weekend. Ars notes that a cancelled Xbox 360 GoldenEye remake had explored online split-screen instead, but this museum rig solved the problem on the original console.