Fun with dual monitors

[Thomen]

There is also this:
http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/

Software to emulate the Triplehead2Go, unfortunately the supported number of games are rather limited.

[Arclight]

Would it be possible to have a virtual machine output on the secondary output of the card, and run your teamspeak etc. on that, while the physical machine runs the game and outputs on the primary display?

That way you could avoid the game minimizing I guess, but perhaps would also require seperate mouse & keyboard.

Just a thought, never even used VM myself.

[NeonSamurai]

Hmm ok think you guys missed the point, im not trying to get a game to play on both monitors, but use the big monitor for gaming, while using the laptop's monitor to keep track of other stuff.

The problem though is you can't do it with the game full screen otherwise it will task switch and the game will minimize (or crash out, or freeze the system). Problem though is I hate running games windowed. So I was looking for a solution where i could use the laptop's display with out crashing the game in full screen


Interesting idea Arclight, but I dont think it would work as you would still task switch to the vm software running the vm. Also i dont know if there is a way of running multiple controls (2 keyboards and mice) together as separate input devices off one machine.


So far the only answer i found from digging around was http://www.playxpert.com which injects directx based windows into games. it lets you use im, surf the net, handle team speak etc, with out dropping out of the game. Theoretically it may be possible to drag the windows it uses in games over to the other monitor (Which is showing the desktop) and thus interact with them with out dropping out of a full screen game, and with out the windows cluttering up the game display.

[Arclight]

That Playxpert is probably your best bet. Personally I only use dual monitors for games like FSX and Supreme Commander, which natively support it. The main reason I don't use it more often is exactly what you're trying to get around; the game dropping out full-screen.

Separate controls for a VM might be posible if you disable one set in a hardware config on one machine and disable the other set in hardware config on VM. Same for monitor output. But if you have to task switch to the VM like you said you're back at square one.

As far as I can find info on it, it's not something anyone has a solution to.

[NeonSamurai]

Nope would probably require microsoft to make it possible to treat the 2 desktops as individual with separate task switching per display. Would be cool if one could also assign processors to each display. Unfortunately windows will probably not change any time soon and will still mainly be focused around one primary task from the days when systems only had one cpu.