Gran Turismo 3 hides a genuinely wild Easter egg: a proper multi-console “i.LINK Battle” mode that, with the right hardware, turns into a way to play the game across three screens as one continuous, glorious widescreen picture.
Project Notes
| Status | Completed |
| Goal | Play Gran Turismo 3 in ultra-widescreen using three linked PlayStation 2 consoles. |
The trick needs three fat PlayStation 2s (only the fat model has an i.LINK/FireWire port), three copies of the game, and an i.LINK hub to link them together. Once wired up and powered on, GT3’s Arcade > i.LINK Battle mode lets one console take over as the “server” while the other two drop into a synced waiting state — together driving three screens as one continuous view.
Getting the screen order right (server in the middle, the other two left and right) isn’t something the game lets you configure in software — it’s fixed by the physical i.LINK wiring order, so it took a fair amount of trial-and-error console-and-cable shuffling to land 1-2-3 correctly. Once solved, it works exactly as well as it sounds: full peripheral vision, and — as a bonus — the same trick also works in Gran Turismo 4.
The first pass ran across three separate monitors, bezels and all. Later I picked up an ultra-widescreen monitor and two Datapath VisionAV-HD capture cards to combine all three PS2 feeds into one seamless picture on a single screen — proper “ultra super mega widescreen.”
I later did the same thing with Gran Turismo 5 on three PlayStation 3s — see Gran Turismo 5 on Multi Monitors.
More details:
And also in video form below. Enjoy!
