Dual Monitors

[horseboy]

Has anyone gotten a dual monitor setup fully working for displaying cpviewer or johnny5? I seen a few thread where people got the little dot matrix screens working through the serial port, but I am talking about a regular second screen. HowardC posted that he got dual monitors working for dual screen games like Punch Out, but I am not sure if he figured out how to do a separate monitor just for the cp layout. Mccoy also is planning to implement something similar into his cab, but I am not sure how he will do it. So has anyone gotten this working?

Also just a side note here. One guy did it with a Gameboy Advance. It is really sweet, but I think he had to go in and make all of the files himself. This seems like a pretty viable option if someone could figure out how to make it work with CPviewer or Johnny5.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=17856.msg149401#msg149401

http://joelsgadgets.com/gba.html

[horseboy]

Nobody has tried this?

[grantspain]

we have a wartran in our arcade that uses the same system you describe-it uses the the standard vga plug and the dvi plug for each monitor output-i guess you could only achieve this by having your software set up for two seperate outputs-sorry can't help more but its definitely possible

[nobbo]

i use dual monitors on my pc at work all the time, and in my experience, if you have a program (eg firefox) maximized in the second monitor window, when you close the program and then re launch it, it will open in the second window again, until i restore the window, drag it to the first monitor and maximize it there....maybe if you open cpviewer or j5 in the second window and do the same, and then try launching it through mamewah and see what happens (i dont have much experience with j5 or cpviewer so i dont even know if maximizing is an option though  )

[Trimoor]

How do you get dual screen games working?  That's exactly what I'm looking for right now.

[horseboy]

Talk to HowardC about that one. I read a thread on here that he had about that one.

[Howard_Casto]

Getting dual screen games to work, under my technique, requires the most awful hack of the mame source code you've ever seen.  The solution for now is to wait as Aaron has finally upgraded mame's video core and one of his priorities is multi-monitor managment. 


My experiments with dual monitors came to a halt because I want to use psone screens and I couldn't get them to diplay properly.  As of this morning, however, my matrox mystique vid card came in and my psone displays are finally working!  Dualie (my multi-monitor-managment software) is back in business and I will be working on it actively again.

As for j5, just use the -position tag as mentioned in the readme.txt  Setting a negative y value makes j5 move above yoru primary monitor, a y value larger than the resolution makes it move below the primary, ect....

You can have J5 constantly refresh the game by using the -listen tag.  J5 "listens" for a text file named clo.txt in it's root directory.  All you need is a fe (or a batch file that can be launched from a fe) that rewrites the command line you would typically send to j5 to clo.txt prior to a game launch. 

As I said, my secondary monitors weren't really working before, so this mode hasn't had a lot of testing, but it should work just fine.

[mccoy178]

This is good news.

[Howard_Casto]

Been working on this the last day or so. 

check it:

http://fe.donkeyfly.com/forum/index.php?topic=119.225

[MaximRecoil]

Been working on this the last day or so. 

check it:

http://fe.donkeyfly.com/forum/index.php?topic=119.225

The opening post said:

HowardC posted that he got dual monitors working for dual screen games like Punch Out

What are the details of that? Or, do you have the link to where you posted about it?

Edit: Nevermind, I found the thread.

[Howard_Casto]

Go over to the controls.dat forums for my wip.  This stuff is working but it isn't ready for a release yet.