Dual Monitors

Please excuse my ignorance of PC configurations, but what would be involved in displaying SL on dual monitors?

I'm asking for lilone, who is trying to outfit wilde Cunningham with a new PC, and since wilde is really a group of 6 or 7, it would be nice if, when they are in-world, there were 2 displays visible at the same time.

Is there some way I can just split the monitor output from their graphics card? Do I need a special dual monitor card?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

- Ace

Are you saying you want the same display to show on two monitors?

Or do you want each monitor to cover a different display. Kinda like the left monitor would show everything on the left and right monitor everything on the right. This is the one I'm interested in, personally.

If I understand you correctly Ace, this is what you are looking for

Never really priced them out, but 54 bucks seems decent to me.

Bingo... That's exactly what I need: two monitors, each displaying the full SL screen. That way, there can be one on either side of the room, and it'll be easier for wilde's r/l humans to see.

Thnx Pete,

- Ace

in your excitement

don't forget that you'll still be working with only one graphics card putting out a display for one monitor. The way I understand it is this switch will be stretching that resolution over your second monitor giving you only -half- the resolution to each monitor. This has alot of potential to make SL look horrible.

I'm going to research this further, though. I'm very intrigued. I was told it's not this easy. But it seems this product is claiming it can do it for $54.00

~Lefty

I think you are mistaken Lefty. This is designed to put the same output as you would have from a single monitor, and reproduce it on a 2nd montior. It basically takes the output from your video card, amps it, then sends it out to multiple sources.

BTW Ace, I looked around a bit more, and you can get them for about $35 (plus the cost of cables)

My video card comes with one analog output and one digital output, a digital to analog converter was included with the card. I plugged the converter in on the digital output and plugged in an old monitor. I can watch two copies of SL, spread SL out across both monitors, or have SL on one monitor and the Forums on the other. It works fine with insignicant performance loss.

I used duals in sl, but gave it up recently. I 2 vid cards and it worked fine. Problem is, that when you want to strech sl , it decides NOT to give you any more space, you av is super fat and everything is squished >_<

Almost all ATI and Nvidia video cards sold in the last couple of years support dual monitors. You can set them to span a single image across both monitors, to mirror, or even to display full-screen video on one whenever the video player is invoked.

I use a GeForce 5800 Ultra and two 17" monitors right now, for a 2048x768 (hey, I have bad eyesight, okay? ) desktop. I've set my taskbar to only dock on one monitor, and routinely move it, depending on what I'm doing that requires full-screen video or 3D. Apps maximize to take up one full monitor, so I run with two programs maximized at once.

Look at the back of your computer. If your video card has a blue connector and wider, white connector, your computer already supports dual monitors. Just plug another one in, and you're set. (You probably got a little converter that goes from DVI (that's the big, white one) to VGA included with your video card. If not, they're a couple dollars at any good computer store.

By the way, if you want to have a REALLY BIG SL window spanning both monitors you're in for some pretty slow framerates!