Dual Monitors w/Mame

[hyiu]

no.... I think there is some difference btw what you say and what I mean...

I understand what you mean.... but I'm not thinking about video cards like radeon with dual display....

I've used those "stock trader" workstations before.... (those are quite expensive...) and I don't think it has primary or secondary displays.... you know... traders... they have like dual screens.... 3 screens... or even 4 screens (forming a square...).... (and whatever the setup is.... it is "merged" as if it is 1 BIG monitor.....

if I know how to modify the code to output both screens of cyberball on to my current 1 monitor, then I'll save up and BUY that video card.... then to the computer, I only have 1 monitor (once I change to that video card, the computer wouldn't know anything about "primary" or "secondary" display...) it only knows that the current display is like 1280 x 480 instead of 640 x 480..... since the video card will be fast enough... I should have no pblm... right

now..... am I making sense ??.... or that's not how it works at all ?

[tom61]

The only problem with doing multi-screens as one screen with consumer level cards is that they hog resources (based on what Howard_Casto said and my limited playing with it).

With multitasking across monitors I got 'Critical' lack of resource errors when the same apps running on a single monitor worked fine. Right now I only have 128MB PC100 (won't run stable at PC133, even though it says it's PC133) and a 1 Ghz Athlon XP (should be 1.33Ghz, but the 100Mhz memory bus underclocks the processor). I think I'm going to get 256MB of DDR for a gift from a friend, so that should help.

I would've played around with Mame and NView (multi-mon control software for NVidia based cards) last night, but I was fighting with installing a new HD in my system.

As for the "stock trader" cards, if they're completely transparent to Windows, that'd mean they have hardware that does what software does on the consumer level cards, and therefore should not suffer slow down when running Mame. However, if these cards are quite expensive, and the only reason you want one is to play Cyberball properly,why not just buy a real Cyberball and save yourself the hassles?

[Howard_Casto]

Also there is another problem with these specialty cards....  As they are completely hardware you can't adjust the picture properly.  It's hard to explain, but if you are using multiple resolutions it's very hard to adjust multiple monitors spanning the same picture so that they align properly.  

Also cards like that I've seen Require recalibration to switch the number of monitors.  In other words you would be stuck with dual displays with all games, which might not be what you want.  

But those are minor problems which can be worked around, the big problem lies in the fact that mame doesn't know about the card.  All these cards do is split the pisture in half and shoot each half to the monitor, it doesn't do any smart sizing.  So lets say you want to play xmen on dual monitors.  Xmen looks "letterboxed" on a single monitor.  If you were to output it to dual monitors that letterboxed space would still be there. Why?  Because those black bands are actually rendered by mame.  Also two monitors when the screen is letterboxed is simply too wide.  So the hardware give you two choices..... both halves blown up to the size of the monitor, wasting a great deal of vertical and horizontal space from the vertical bars, or distorted filled space, which stretches the game to nearly twice the width due to the fact that the letter box bands are actually part of the picture.  

Long story short.... Those cards are meant to be used with displays in multiples of 4 so that the aspect ratio of a single monitor is maintained.  When you use two or three you get distortion or wasted space which makes the visible area jsut about the same as it would be on a single monitor.  

You see that's not how those cards work... it doesn't give you a, custom, larger resolution (making windows think you have a huge monitor)  it supports super high resolutions, but only in a normal aspect ratio.  They usually manually adjust to the apps aspect to display the spanned image.  This won't work in mame as each game has a different aspect ratio.  

Now there are cards that do what you said, but I seriously doubt that's what you saw.
Those with three monitors you have seen are using a dual display card, or they are out of anyone's price range.  (I'm talking $1000 for starters)  As tom said, if you are going to spend that much money it would make more sense to just buy the game.

It's complicated to explain so I hope that makes sense.  

[hyiu]

now I understand better... (I think....) Thank you for all the explanations.....

well... too bad my house won't be able to fit just a cyberball machine... (I would like to....) actually... seeing a couple on sale on ebay... and bid price is not that high either.....

anyway..... I don't have those cards in hand now... but if I get one of those high end dual screen video cards at work... I'll definitely give it a try and post findings...

well... I guess I have to stick with my original plans for now.... (just a normal cab....)

 

[wee beastie]

I work for a financial institution.  We have multiple monitors on all of our computers.  These cards suffer from the same problems.  Using them is a pain in the ass.  If you span monitors with any program, it crushes your system.  I don't think this will work as well as some believe.