GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[oldyz]

this is a challeging thing for the best hackers here, but i think is very possible through the editor:

some time ago Ollo and Gremlins made some stereoscopic pictures
of Goldeneye and Perfect dark.

we search 2 of this pics out and tried them on a new one of those samsung 3d tvs using the USB port in the 3d mode and they looked pretty good.

here is the thing - i don't know if PJ64 or the other emulators will work in 3d mode when used in very good pcs with a stereo 3d capable card and the right monitor-

but through hacking the game you can play 3d Perfect Dark in a 3d tv:

SO here is the hack -
IN perfect dark the coop mode is modified -
the screen is split horizontally or vertically but there is no player 2
instead the second screen shows all the actions of player 1 but with the camera at a few "centimiters" to the right-

the only problem is that using the hacked rom on the n64 -you have to up-convert the game to be 720 progressive (1280 by 720)
through a dvd player
OR record your gameplay and resize the video to 1280 720.
also the thing that the split screens are low res....
That is no problem for standard PCs because they emulator can display
the game at higher resolution.....

for those lucky to have the 3d tvs - they choose the Mod coop mode and they can play using the samsung's side by side 3D option or up-down 3d mode.

for others they can record their gameplay screens and upload them if they wish to youtube for the world to see - the resulting gameplay will look like this:
( click on the 3d options - parallel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGkxI6GeVjw

Please if any of you have time see if it can be done
i will ask gremlins for the pictures and post them,
but bringing PD and GE to the 3d tv generation will be nice to see

[radorn]

changing the rendering code of an n64 game is sure not a trivial task.
I'm positive that the editor is not intended for this at all.
It could be done under emulation, since n64 emulation is broadly based in HLE of the video rendering, and the point of view can be manipulated (some old emu's plugin can displace camera in about any game), but this has nothing to do with rom hacking.
The method you describe may sound ingenious, but it would actually be the hardest thing to do.

3D could be had under emulation (not exactly easy, but could be done, although there could also be errors), but forget about it in real hardware or implemented as a rom hack.

[oldyz]

Looks like confusion was part of the posible hack

it is because we played star fox 64
and when one of the player dies the screen belonging to them
becomes a camera...

somehow i had the idea this happened too in PD and goldeneye
(it does not)
and thought this could be used to turn player 2 in to a camera

using the emulator i have tried the mirror "player" trick to try to see a crosseyed stereo vision effect and it works until player 2 is hit with a bullet or is de-syncronised (you map all player 1 buttons to player 2 and align them side by side using a wall and contention)
aaaaaaaannnnnnnd there is the thing that you can only walk sideways
or forward back- if you turn the right eye becomes the behind eye

maybe player 2 can be turned in to
a non-existent invincible object with no clipping that would mimic Player 1s movements, but this sounds more like a editor-gameshark thing

question: Doesn't the player turn in to just a camera when killed?
(the dying animation)

[zoinkity]

Okay, you're really asking for two things, so just to warn you this is going to be a somewhat long, involved post.

Adding More Viewports:
First, you can add more viewports supposing you resize everything to fit on the screen. The basis of a viewport is a perspective matrix and something to look at. (in awe of total understatement) In the case of these two particular games it is slightly more involved as there is a specific 1st/3rd person view which can be alternately swapped between.
For the sake of argument though, by altering the viewport to be further back, you'd effectively make a 3rd person view. By using a second viewport to render the same scene, you could very well have a 1st/3rd setup.
That said, I'm not doing it.

Adding Additional Render Modes:
The basics first. The N64 uses COP2 to render the 3D microcode into a video image. This is copied to rdram (that 4-8MB of RAM), and from there sent to your screen via the video interface. The settings on the VI interrupt tells it how to send the data so your screen can interpret it properly.
So, keep in mind that any changes to the size or colour depth of the image will also affect how much ram you suck down during play. This isn't as big a concern for GE as PD, since with GE you could always be a cheap jerk and use an 8MB pak to get at least an additional 4MB of video memory.

Lets say you want to alter the bitdepth from 16bit to 32bit. Most people can't percieve the difference, but hey, we'll say you have special occular implants. You do this by setting a particular bit in the VI. To change the size of the output image, there's about 3-4 settings that need to be altered, but again this is basically trivial.
It gets a little more involved if you need to deal with refresh rates. I'm not even sure how they calculate the refresh rate, but that's probably some strange balance between cycles and hertz.

Notice though the real isue here is that you're still interpretting a static picture. I don't know what silliness they do to make supposedly 3D TV, and am a bit suspect of most of these things. Differential images seem the most likely course, but to get differential images to spit out to screen with perfect alteration would likley require two additional buffers and some very careful CPU timing. I'd refer you to the only other disgustingly-complex use of clever CPU timing for video output--Resident Evil. You should still be able to find the programming articles on the subject.

Long story short, this alternate output mode is likely possible but would require low-level hardware knowledge beyond the ability of the amateur hacking community.
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[oldyz]

zoinkity wrote:

Okay, you're really asking for two things, so just to warn you this is going to be a somewhat long, involved post. Adding More Viewports: First, you can add more viewports supposing you resize everything to fit on the screen. The basis of a viewport is a perspective matrix and something to look at. (in awe of total understatement) In the case of these two particular games it is slightly more involved as there is a specific 1st/3rd person view which can be alternately swapped between. For the sake of argument though, by altering the viewport to be further back, you'd effectively make a 3rd person view. By using a second viewport to render the same scene, you could very well have a 1st/3rd setup. That said, I'm not doing it.

il like the reply - i have to have it explained more by being read by somebody else.

i don't want the view to be further back just moved to the left or the right very slightly.

Here is the thing , the very first step for the weird hack based on the game split screen displays is to make the game display
player one's view in 2 screens , resolution does not matter
(since it does not matter when you play coop any way)

thanks for interest

[radorn]

As I said, before, the only reasonable way of making a stereoscopic GE hack would be to implement it as a feature on an HLE based n64 emulator.

The N64 hardware was not though for stereoscopy.
hacking tha game for it would be extremelly hard and the result would surely be really slow.
In principle, stereoscopy requires twice the performance, and monoscopic GE is already slow enough

[zoinkity]

The specifications may not be the limiting factor as much as the video output method itself. Without knowing exactly how to format stereoscopic video so it can be read by whatever screen you're using, it would be impossible to say definitively if this is possible on hardware.

My point would be this. The dedicated video hardware in an N64 is a bit overkill in respect to its other specs, so it isn't beyond reason that you could render two sets of scenes, especially in series. Being programmable, you can also, theoretically, get around the requirement of sending the same data twice to render the second screen. Also, runtime speed is, in these two cases, more dependant on the efficiency of the game code than any hardware limitation.
The real question is if any N64 game could output properly-formatted stereoscopic images that would be correctly read by a stereoscopic display. If the answer is yes, than I posit at least some N64 games can also be reprogrammed to accept this output type, the reason being that at least some software limitations can be overcome.
_________________
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