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Dual monitor help sick of being told no or i dont know.

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Tovas

Member
Joined
Aug 13, 2003
Location
Nashville TN
I have a 9800pro and want to run dual monitors if i can run them the way i want and im very determind...

Basically what i want to do is this, not only do i want to view windows apps on a full dual monitor set up but DVD's, Games, everything that you see on one to be displayed 50/50 on 2 monitors.

Im tired of hearing overlays this, Direct X that, copyright protection blah blah blah *sorry im not angry just really tired of seeing the same things everywhere or when you find people that have asked the question there are no real replies.

there has to be a way to turn 2 monitors into one monitor! hardware, software, something!

Remember going into best buy and they had the nintendo 64 display up overhead on the nine monitors? well if they can do it with 9 has to be a way to do it with 2. you see them everywhere TV, movies, Mags. Where they have each monitor displaying a piece of the image to be displayed.

hardware? software? any ideas... please...
 
Ive searched for hours trust me it doesnt look like UltraMon will do what this to do... there are countless post in the UltraMon forum with people wanting to do the same thing.

Im at in a tough spot i have a 22 inch monitor.

"Sure im greedy I want more, but isnt that why these forums are here? To get as much out of what you have as you can?"

An upgrade to 24 inch is well over a grand for the Sony. and for 1.5 inches its not really worth it. Dual LCDs offers way more realestate for the same amount of cash or even less depending on who you buy from. Or spend 2800 on a cheap plasma or 3500 on a 30inch lcd.
 
The things you see in (for example) Best Buy are done with hardware -- you feed one video signal in, and it blows it up and splits it into 4/9/16/whatever signals for multiple screens. AFAIK, nobody makes anything like that for VGA, and it's not cheap anyway.

However, you *can* do what you want to do with monitor spanning. NVIDIA can do this with nView, but it looks like ATI Hydravision does not have this feature. Matrox has the best implementation (they call it "DualView"), but performance there leaves something to be desired. It makes Windows think you just have one extremely large display at, say, 1600x600 or 2048x768. The problem, of course, is that the middle of the screen (for games, etc.) is split between the two monitors. This is where monitor #3 comes in. :) Unfortunately, spanning across three monitors requires a 3-monitor card (you can have 3 monitors with 2 cards, but you can only span monitors being driven by the same physical card), and the only one on the market now is the Matrox P750 (whose 3D performance is, uh, not so good, especially at ~3000x1000 resolution).

For games, only ones that support nonstandard aspect ratios will work properly -- if they don't, you'll end up with either only part of the display used, or the 4:3 screen stretched out to 8:3 (or worse, 12:3), which looks pretty awful. Some games may work better in a windowed mode, where they're somewhat more tolerant of being stretched to weird resolutions. Displaying video (a DVD source, for example) across both screens should work fine.

I'm really annoyed now, because I found a review of it the other day, and now I can't find it again. Every search for "monitor spanning" turns up a million irate articles about the iBook and how it doesn't support it. Clearly I'm not doing the same search I did before. :-/

This was something else I found the last time I was looking, but not exactly it:

http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/faq.asp

(scroll down a bit to the section on "Span Mode". This site also has information on games that support multimonitor modes either natively or through hacks.)
 
Matthias99 got it right, I use Nview to do the screen split (I can watch a dvd on both monitors split down the middle), but why do that? then you have a nasty space in the middle. I am running dual monitors (2x 21" sony trinitrons, that is about 150 lbs of monitor!!) I had a 9500np (softmod to 9700) and the dual monitor support blew chunks. I haven't seen any improvement from ATi on their dual monitor support. But NVIDIA has been improveing there support with just about every driver update.
 
More than certain ATi hardware can do it. Whether or not they choose to implement it is another problem.

See if you can request that feature for their drivers. That's how nVidia got their nView features up. Driver features requests.
 
is day ebay or mothball your monitors and invest in one of these

http://www.go-l.com/monitors/cinerama/specs/index.htm

the cheapest is only 1500 bucks and i think it works with any grapohics card ill check it out and get back to you.

*EDIT* ya if you want one on all 3 then your good but i think you need the dual setup or 3 cards for sperate viewing not sure on that part though

*EDIT AGAIN* not sure now, they say you can get the matrox cards with them for yada yada yada but it doesnt say if you need it to view it all on one, id dont thik you do since its all one monitor... they dont ship till dec 15 though so youll have to wait a bit
 
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I once saw some software used that allowed this guy to run 13 monitors in games (best buy style only with CTR's) with a bunch of computers (9). It was in MaximumPC Sept. 2003. Its called Wideview. wideview.00server.com , http://members.chello.nl/~r.alvarado/TutorialWide.htm .
Though in there it says that what he shows only works with FlightSim, I don't know if that means most games don't support that large of a res or don't work the same way with multimonitors (the later would mean this won't work for what you want).

So as far as I know these are your options:
1.Widview (maybe).
2.Matrox video card (sub par 3d preformance).
3.An expensive Hardware video signal splitter, here you would PROBABLY need 4 monitors or omthing so that yoiu keep the same aspec ratio, unless your video card supports goofy resolutions.
(4. Other 3rd part software that may or may not exist.)

But I have dual monitors setup with a PCI card and an AGP card (could work with mulitple PCI cards (only or in addion to AGP) too), I can play movies on both monitors (not 50/50, just one or the other) and play games on one while having the other(s) display other stuff, like Windows windows, Winamp, Samurize, and Trilian so I can see whats goin' on.

ohlala, I love that desktop :drool:
 
i still like my sweet tri-monitor thing and if i had 1,500 id buy one and if i had 17,000 id but the top of the line 4 screen one but i dont so im stuck on my little 15 inches of crap.... for now.
 
There's some question as to whether that site is actually selling anything, or is just some sort of elaborate hoax (nobody seems to have actually successfully purchased anything from them yet).

Irregardless, the WideView thing relies on the fact that MS Flight Simulator (and some other FS games) has "real" multi-monitor support, and so would not work with other applications (though Windows itself has no problem with that many screens, if you had five or six dual-head PCI cards). Systems nowadays are generally fast enough to actually run multiple screens on their own (without needing to network more than one computer together). Although 13 would probably be pushing it. :)

AFAIK, they don't make VGA hardware splitters, at least until you start getting up into expensive professional-level solutions.

This would let you take a composite signal (like output from a VCR or cable box) and put it on 4 VGA monitors, though I don't know the price:

http://exptech.com/home/Multimedia/Mulitmedia_Links/HR22.htm

This would do what you want, but it looks expensive:

http://www.rgbspectrum.de/Webpages/specsheets/cwallbro.pdf

The Matrox three-monitor card is probably your best bet in a remotely affordable solution, and the only thing it lacks is high-end 3D performance.
 
Well most video cards now have S-video out and you can get converters from S-video to Video (the one that looks like RCA) pretty easily and its not too expensive.

Though the second link he had looked pretty fancy...
 
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