DescentBB

Ive been playing an MMORPG a lot lately (Eve Online), and a lot of the things that go on in the game are not so intensive that its worth devoting my undivided attention to the game for the most part, but running it in a window and switching between apps proved to be too distracting, so I went ahead and hooked my old 13 inch monitor up to the second video output on my video card (nvidia ti4600, 2nd port is a DVI with a converter on it) so I could use the 2nd monitor for IM/web browsing/etc while playing eve. so far this has worked very good, however I am a novice at this dual monitor thing, so I have a few questions.

First and foremost is this: If i have an app running in full screen mode on one monitor and I click on an app on the other monitor, the fullscreen app on the other monitor either minimizes or returns to windowed mode. Is there any way to prefent this? People have developed workaround solutions for eve, mainly running the game in the same resolution as your desktop and then using a program to move the window such that the actual game area occupies the same amount of room as your desktop while in windowed mode, allowing for pseudo-fullscreen play, but I would like to run other applications in full screen on my main monitor, namely some video applications so I could watch movies and chat at the same time with more ease.

Second, is there any way to completely disable the 2nd monitor for times when Im not using it without a reboot?

Third, is there an easier way to switch which monitor is the primary monitor other than going into display properties and switching it there? Ideally it would be something in the system tray that would switch the monitors between primary and secondary, as well as moving the taskbar and desktop icons to the other monitor. The way Ive got my monitors is my 19inch flatscreen which I want to play my games on is in front of me, and the 13 inch that I want to use for IM/Browsing while running an app fullscreen on the 19inch is off to the side. When I'm not doing anything fullscreen on the main monitor I'd like to be able to switch the other monitor off since its quality is a lot lower than my main ones, but I'd also be able to just jump right in to something fullscreen when I want to as well, rather than doing prepwork.

Fourth, I run my main monitor at 1280x960, while the 13 inch is running at 1024x768, Ive noticed that this has caused some problems for apps like Media Player Classic when trying to run them fullscreen. Are there any other problems I'm going to run into from running the two monitors in different resolutions?

Video games generally automatically minimize when they lose focus, it is something built in to the way most developers handle alt-tabbing out of a game. Doom3 is one exception, if you alt tab out of Doom3 to something on monitor 2, Doom3 remains on monitor 1, though when you tab out you can't hear any sound from the game till you tab back in. In general a lot of 3d games like exclusive control of the PC and will not allow you to surf the web and play at the same time. Descent3 does this as well, even if I have a bunch of IM windows open on monitor 2, if I get a message I can see it, but if I try to alt-tab over Descent automatically minimizes.

There is no \"fast\" way to disable the second monitor, if it bothers you, set it's desktop background to all black and close all the windows on it, or just turn it off completely when you aren't using it. Though once you get going with a dualview there won't be many times you are not using both screens. The same holds for setting which monitor is the primary monitor.

As for media player classic, I use it as well, granted both my monitors are the same size and resolution now, but they were not before and I have never had a problem with it, discribe what it is doing. Also are you using a recent version? If you aren't sure, just install the latest CCCP from http://cccp-project.net it uses MPC v6.4.9.0.

Allright, after a few hours of tinkering Ive found some ways using nvidia stuff to do what I wanted to do with points two and three, but point one is still a large concern.

As for media player classic, Im using 6.9.8.4 and what happened was when I alt-entered to fullscreen it, it would get extremely choppy and crop itself into the upper left most 1024x768 area of my main display (1280x960). Disabling \"allow applications to span displays\" in this nvidia nview thing seems to have fixed it, but point 1 is still valid, altho the program that jury-rigs eve into pseudo-fullscreen mode might somehow be employed here as well.

The whole minimizing when clicking elsewhere thing will get very old very fast tho. Especially if I get back into playing other games fullscreen.

Some games that I have (like Shattered Galaxy, an MMORTS sorta thing), wont even let the cursor leave the screen. And Diablo2 flat out refuses to run with both monitors activated.

Avder, get Ultramon straight away.

You have many questions, and unfortunately I do not have answers. dualhead hardware varies quite greatly, and so do the options in drivers, and this is just for one brand! The brands differ again, also.

Some drivers are great - FYI, I have the old set of 41.44 drivers for my work machine. (They were the famous \"cheater\" drivers from nVidia, where the scenes went invisible if you moved outside the clipping path.) But they're great for 'nView\".

nView I have found to be superior to ATI's offering (X800XL at home) in terms of functionality.

You're always going to have issues if the resolutions of your monitors don't match.

1. What is ultramon, and will it do anything for my main issue?

2. I have no intention of downgrading my drivers, I just upgraded to current and Ive noticed a substantial performance increase in EVE and Im not going to mess with it for a while.

You can get the latest burning-hot builds of MPC from here. If it's in fullscreen and you click a window on another monitor, it won't drop out of fullscreen (this is a relatively recent addition, within the last month or two I think). That's also the place to get the latest greatest ffdshow.

If you want to attain maximum productivity, multimonitor or not, I highly recommend bbLean (direct to zip). There are many plugins available for it that offer a wide range of functionality. I personally use bbLeanSkin (not always a good idea to run this plugin, but I don't have any trouble with it. you definitely should edit the exclusions file to exclude games though), bbCalendar, BBInterface (to control bbCalendar, and for a volume slider), bbdigitalex, bbIconBox (for system tray), bbIcons (for individual application launch buttons. bbIconBox can do this more easily though), SystemBarEx (pure awesomeness. I love the alt-click feature, turns a button into a teeny icon, great for Winamp, chat programs, etc. I disabled the bb button/clock/systray and only use it for tasks), BBSysmonPlus (realtime statistics: CPU/MEM usage, HD space, uptime, IP addr, network activity), bbKeys (keyboard shortcuts), BBkeyhook (volume keys), and bbmemo (perpetual background Notepad). With all that running, bbLean's memory usage is all of 14mb right now. Beat that, eh? Oh, and here is a community site of sorts.

Screenshot (1024x768 secondary set on left of 1280x1024 primary--this keeps windows from shifting around when your screen res changes, ie for D3)

It takes a while to set up and customize obviously (wasting hours a day for a few days tweaking it is not uncommon for hardcore beginners ), and it isn't for everyone, but those who do it never go back.

Damn....Im gonna have to look into that this weekend.

I've used BlackBox for Windows before.... heck, I've used it in Linux, too. It's fantastic in Windows, makes everything much faster and better looking, IMO.

I also had problems running some things in dualview, though it was mostly in Linux. For the most part, I wound up just playing games in a window... if my desktop was at 1024x768, I'd play Descent3 at 920xwhatever and treat it like a regular window. Like has been said, the alt-tabbing thing isn't widely standardized, and in some cases it doesn't work at all.

What I wound up doing was using a spare computer (I have tons) and a program called Synergy which lets you share keyboard and mouse across the network, even copy& paste and so forth. This gave the illusion of having a dualview setup, but in actuality it was two computers, and I had no problems with maximized windows. The only downfall to Synergy is that you can't drag windows from one screen to the other, but in all other repsects it's pretty much the same as dualview in actual use. It even works cross-platform.

Let us know how it works out!

pATCheS wrote:You can get the latest burning-hot builds of MPC from here. If it's in fullscreen and you click a window on another monitor, it won't drop out of fullscreen (this is a relatively recent addition, within the last month or two I think). That's also the place to get the latest greatest ffdshow.

I downloaded the abolute lastes version, however it still drops out of fullscreen when I click the other mintor. Is there a feature I need to enable somewhere?

When I click on something on monitor 2 while MPC is playing full screen it doesn't drop from full screen, unless I click on the desktop itself. Switching to IM windows or explorer windows doesn't make it drop, but the desktop will.