[simpits-tech] Falcon multiple monitor support workaround

[Matt Bailey]

Presumably, the other monitors would continue to be updated by the video
card......I know of no other way to keep the screen from immediately
going blank (and eventually, into suspend mode). The idea of refreshing
peripheral monitors at a lower rate than the main (peripheral monitors
being the monitors that are not currently "engaged"), is interesting, it
could save on processing power. Don't know how you'd do it with just one
instance of the sim software though......

Of course, the basic approach we're talking about here will not work for
anything like a seamless view (IOW, the monitors will need to be quite a
distance apart). You can get a monitor splitter that takes the signal
from one output and sends it to multiple monitors (no CPU overhead
AFAIK, it's all just signal sharing). This would allow you to look
around with TrackIR or whatever, and all screens would update
identically so that by the time you "looked" at a screen, it would be
showing more or less what should be in your FOV. But I think this would
look weird. :P In fact if you're gonna do that, you might almost be as
well off to just stick with one monitor and small head movements.

I'm not familiar with Falcon 4 (never even played it), but is there any
way to force it to not automatically reset resolution of the monitor to
Falcon 4's startup res? Can it be run windowed? I'm thinking of a trick
I read about an X-Plane user trying, for multiple monitors (X-Plane has
fairly comprehensive support for multiple displays, but only via a
network, not on one machine). As I recall, he had two monitors on a dual
headed video card, and set his desktop res double the pixel height of
one monitor, so that the desktop took up both monitors (in a vertical
orientation). He then ran X-Plane at the res of his desktop (which would
be 1024x1536, assuming 1024x768 monitor res), and thusly it filled both
screens. Not ideal, since you can't specify multiple viewpoints, but
it's better than nothing. This may be an option to explore in Falcon 4,
assuming that sim allows the necessary tweaks to resolution and FOV.

So Falcon 4 can't run networked amongst several machines, with one
master instance of the app on the main machine spitting out 3D coords to
the other machines? I really think getting this to work would be the
best solution by *far*, and computers are cheap these days.......

	-Matt Bailey