I''ve been doing a little directdraw/3d coding recently and noticed that debugging will hang my machine any many points. I spent a little time looking around and found that having duel video cards and duel monitors would be a good solution. Does anyone have any experience with this? I''m wanting to buy an new PC but have never bought duel video before. What issues do I have to look out for? Things I''m interested in: -Do I need the video cards to be the same? -Do I need any special features on the cards to support duel? -Can I buy one good card (geforsce) and a crappy old PCI and still do debugging or do I need accelleration on both Is there anything else I shoudl know before parting with my cash? I was thinking of a geforce sdr (agp) and a tnt2 16(pci) I use windows 2000. Thanks gimp

I've been thinking about doing this as well...
I only know of one guy who has two voodo2's (pci) and he uses the RTSI (or something like that) and one monitor...

Considering that I've yet to see a MB with dual AGP, I think you must buy a good 3D card & a crappy PCI...

The last place I work on a project for had a machine with two monitors for an *extra* big 42"x21" display. It was very odd watching the mouse cursor disappear off one screen and popping up on the other...

No they can't be the same card (at least not too AGP's) And I wouldn't want to try using two of the same card (what if the drivers are not multi-instance safe?)


I believe the dual card ability is feature of windows, if the drivers are certified, it should work...

I don't know how expensive TNT2's are now, but I wouldn't spend than $50 on the second card... You already have a badass 3D acclerator with the GeForce... why buy another 3D card - I guess you could test your game with a lower performance card...

Edited by - Magmai Kai Holmlor on June 27, 2000 8:39:42 PM

Edited by - Magmai Kai Holmlor on June 27, 2000 8:40:38 PM

Why would I want to buy an accellerated second card?

Reason is that I read somewhere that directx will shell it''s graphics to the secondary video card rather than the primary when you set it to duel monitor, and because some features of directx are only availble through the HAL (as in the HEL has to substitute function) I thought it might be a good idea. Besides that, running a kickass game in software would be painful to test.

(Oh and here in australia a TNT2 is $150, not $50 thought my yearly bonus was 10k after tax so I don''t mind, I''m buying a whole new system anyway...)

Thanks

gimp

As a person who is running a dual monitor setup I feel it is my responsibility to tell people about how cool it is...

1) You don't need the same cards, you just need cards which have dual monitor support. And of course you can't have 2 AGP cards. Here's a list of cards which I've tested and works with dual monitor... under Win98 and SE
- 3dLabs Permedia 2
- Riva TNT
- Riva TNT2

I 'THINK' a Voodoo3 should be able to work in multi-mon mode too, and of course that is possibliy the only PCI video card available in the market right now.

2) A very important thing to check is wheter your motherboard BIOS allows you to use your AGP as the primary display, this is due to the fact that many motherboards, when installed with both a PCI and an AGP card would use the PCI as the primary display. Newer motherboards allow you to set wheter to use the PCI or AGP card as the primary.

3) The Matrox Millineum G400 has built in dual monitor (dual-head) support. As to how it works, I have no idea.

4) In the MS Docs, you can see that they recommend that you setup your SECONDARY monitor to show your program output, and not your PRIMARY monitor. Therefore it would be wise to get an accelerated secondary card.... (3dfx really did it with PCI support) A company I worked with once created a dual monitor game, for each monitor you have to CREATE the DD and DDS objects... if I remember well. But one thing is for sure, you'll be using HAL.. IF you setup your interfaces properly.

5) You need to add some extra boiler plate code to setup so that you can use the other monitor for display, I can't remember offhand right now but either the DONUTS example or was there a special MULTIMON DONUTS example has such code.

6) You'll love having multiple monitors, now all you need is a bigger desk!

Remember you can connect up to 8 monitors.

Edited by - Marauderz on June 27, 2000 10:54:23 PM

Thanks... That pretty much what I wanted to hear... Now that challenge will be finding a nice PCI card.

(Oh, and funny you mention it but part of the ''PC'' upgrade is a nice ikea corner desk I recently saw).

Thanks

gimp

I just barely looked over this thread and oddly enought I setup a dual monitor set up last night. I have a monochrome monitor that I wanted to use for debugging using Andre LaMothe''s Xtreme Debugging article but I couldn''t find a MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter) for it so I just tried hooking an old SVGA and PCI video card up and try that out. It works great. I am using a nVidia TNT as my Primary and a S3 Virge GX/DX for my Secondary. Now all I need to do is figure out how to set it up so I can use the secondary to display debugging info, or I just might get off my ass and buy a MDA and use Andre''s code.

-Catalyst

PS If you are going to do dual monitor be sure to read MS Help on the issue. I didn''t and ended up staying up until 5 AM last night, although, I was being distracted by those funny NRA infommercials.

As a side note, I figured I''d mention the "Remote Debugging" feature of Visual C++ in case anyone was interested.

If you have two computers and two monitors, you can set up remote debugging. It may not be quite as cool as Dual Monitor, but it is half as cool :-)

You can run the program from one computer, and debug the code from the other, stepping through, setting breakpoints, etc. The same as Dual Monitor pretty much.

The computers need to be networked... there''s also a trick to get it working using the Direct Cable Connection of windows and simply use a Parallel cable (this is what I did at first) instead of needing a hub and two network cards.

If you''re doing parallel cable you need to specify an IP address in the Network part of control panel for both computers. Set one to 111.111.111.1 and the other to 111.111.111.2 (as long as the first 3 masks are the same it should work) -

Anyhow, it''s probably a waste of time, but it''s interesting.

Clay

No, no its a good point, and would probably work for some people. I personall have 2 PC''s... sort of.

Normally my wife doesn''t let me near her one unless she gets to watch... ever since the accident ..and then that other accident.. (gimp says , "What? You didn''t have a backup of the last 2 years worth of your financial data!", gimp gets that sinking feeling as format says 23% complete.....)

I''ve been looking around and the Matrox MAX G400 looks pretty sweet. No screwing around trying to find a PCI acellerated video card, and on the plus side I EBMS. I -should- be picking this up this weekend so I''ll let you all know how I go.

gimp

As a proud G400 owner I should say something about programming dualhead... Too bad I haven''t figured out how to do it properly...

You might already know, but G400''s dualhead includes "clone" display (divx in TV, anyone? , multimon and "DVD enhanced" mode (basically shows dvd in secondary display, in my case TV, no matter what primary diplay is showing... She watches DVD on TV while I code. Cool... .

I once tried to use multimon to debug directx, and results were a bit frustrating; directx app wanted to use my primary display exclusively, leaving TV to show desktop. I wouldn''t mind if I had proper monitor as secondary display to view code from, but...
dx docs say that another monitor should be enumerated. Nice try, but while multimon was in use enum found NO devices - not even voodoo1 I have installed... Was it a bug or what, I didn''t bother to find out.

As G400 can do windowed mode, I prefer do debugging while prog runs windowed. My code works identically whether it is in window or fullscreen, so why not debug it in window... Running full-screen then only finds problems with dx implementation, so really, there is no need to do all-time fullscreen debugging.

Also, before I got G400, I set up voodoo1 to show it''s screen in another display. So I see code in monitor and voodoo''s gfx in another one... Too bad voodoos don''t support features people like to implement today, but to get basic engine running it''s pretty cool way to do it.

I''ve got multi-monitor working and I''m using a Voodoo3 3000 w/ a TGUI94xx Trident PCI video card.. I have used two and they both work I think there 9440 and 9460 or somethin glike that.. The only problem I''ve encountered is that the Voodoo3 won''t do accelerated AGP with dual monitor running! Odd eh? However even with sofware rendering I still get ~58fps in most games so I''m not to bothered by it right now...
It''s not to hard to turn off anyhow.
Good luck! Oh yah, I''m running win98se and all I did is install the second card (My machine was already running with the Voodoo and win98se) and win98 detected it.. insert CD, install.. restart.. right hand click on desktop and click properties (Or control Panel Display Properties) then I enabled extend desktop onto second monitor... and it was running!
Didn''t need to read any docs, however you may want to to use that Monochrome Display Adapter code..
Good luck!
See ya,
Ben