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Holy Crap! Dual Monitor Mame!
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nipsmg:
Instructions for Nvidia cards:

Note: I can only verify that this works with Nvidia cards that have "nView".  I believe it's the forceware drivers, YMMV (I'm using a GEForce 6600).

Go into NView properties (right click on desktop -> nView Properties).
Under the "Desktop Management" tab, click "Display wizard".

Select "custom mode" and when you select the "NVIDIA nView Display Mode" you get 3 options:


* Dualview - Native multi-display mode.  Each display has its own resolution, color dpth, and refresh rate.
* Span - Display sare combined to create one virtual display, your desktop spans both displays.
* Clone - Both displays show the same information.
Select the "Span" option.
The drivers create one large desktop which spans both displays as pictured below:



--NipsMG

Buddabing:
I confimed what Nips said. Works fine with Howard's -resolution -aspect_ratio parameters. (I have Nvidia 6600GT also)
chemame:
OK, this has really gotten my attention.

Curious though as to how Windows itself functions in the span mode... If I'm understanding correctly, everything Windows does will tend to stretch to both monitors?

So let's say I redesign my cab to have two side-by-side monitors, just for the likes of PunchOut... yes I'm just nearly stupid enough to try it... how much hassle is the second screen going to give me when games are NOT stretched across it? How difficuly to have single-screen games on just the left screen? What does MameWah do? etc.

Feedback is greatly appreciated, and may seriously change my plans for the month.

chemame
Buddabing:
It will be a hassle, you'll probably have to specify resolution and aspect ratio for all your games. I tried pacman without specifying resolution and aspect and it was all stretched.

In the "span" modes, Windows treats the two monitors as one big monitor. In "DualView" mode, there are two monitors, which you can still drag stuff across.

Windows itself was able to display stuff normally.





Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: chemame on February 06, 2006, 12:34:03 pm ---OK, this has really gotten my attention.

Curious though as to how Windows itself functions in the span mode... If I'm understanding correctly, everything Windows does will tend to stretch to both monitors?

So let's say I redesign my cab to have two side-by-side monitors, just for the likes of PunchOut... yes I'm just nearly stupid enough to try it... how much hassle is the second screen going to give me when games are NOT stretched across it? How difficuly to have single-screen games on just the left screen? What does MameWah do? etc.

Feedback is greatly appreciated, and may seriously change my plans for the month.

chemame

--- End quote ---


Well first off, punchout is a vertical game, so it would make sense to put one monitor on top of each other, not two side by side.  As a Matter of fact, only the psychio games (two player only) a few select vs games and xmen6p version use two monitors side by side.  On the other hand, playchoice 10, megatech, megaplay, punchout, super punchout and arm wrestling all use  dual monitors in a vetical arrangment. if you could only choose one orientation I would suggest two monitors arranged vertically.  (The cab takes up less space that way too)

Regardless...... the solution seems to be to make profiles (both nvidia and ati support this) of both vetically and horizontally spanned monitors and have the front-ends set these modes just before launch these special case games, leaving the secondary monitor either off, or in standard extended desktop mode, most of the time. 

This can be done two ways.  First off each profile can be assigned a hotkey... it would be a simple matter of simulating those keypresses to change the profile prior to launching the game and then pressing the return hotkey after the game is done.  Also ati (and i believe nvidia) give you the option of saving desktop shortcuts to profiles.   These shortcuts could be launched no problem, or even better yet, the shortcut info could be copied and pasted to a command line argument for more traditional launching. 


With that being said:

If you manually set a regular aspect and a regular resolution in mame while in spanned mode, the second monitor appears to go in mirrored mode, displaying the same image on each monitor.  I have no idea why it does this, but it does.  That would be one way to do it. 

As far as mamewah I have no clue as I don't use it.  But I tested it on Dragon King.  When the settings are left as-is it gets confused.  It displays the image prefectly on one monitor but blacks out the other.  However, if I change the fe resolution to the spanned resolution, the image stretches to span both monitors!    My guess is most fes will perform in a similar manner.  That is, unless the aspect is "locked" to 4:3.  Which brings me to an important note. 

It isn't practical at all to be in this mode all the time on a mame cab because some emulators are locked to 4:3 aspect ratios.  Zinc visual pinball and future pinball come to mind off the top of my head.  What you would get form these games is either a crash, two mirrored images like in mame or a really tiny image centered between both screens. 

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