Using 1 Gaming Computer For 2 People?

True Vox writes "My fiance and I have recently taken interest in City of Heroes (she's currently got a character on my account). She's got a cute little netbook, but nothing nearly powerful enough for a 5-year-old MMORPG, let alone if we take interest in Champions Online! I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase. Has anyone had any experience using one computer to control two monitors with two sets of input devices (e.g. two keyboards and two mice, or one keyboard, one mouse, and a 360 gamepad, perhaps)? I have seen one solution that might work, but not much information from users that I can find. In short, does anyone have any experience with setups like this?"

Comments

Re:RDP

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

A tip for both you and the submitter: fiance is the groom, fiancee is the bride.

There's also an accent on the first e, but I'm not going to attempt it because Slashdot eats my unicode for breakfast.

Fun with Xorg + Linux

[Techman83]

Here LMGTFY, found some interesting links, here's a standout Multiseat Linux - One computer, multiple monitors, mice, and keyboards Probably lots of other ways to do it as well.

Re:Multiseat

[timeOday]

I've been waiting for multiseat linux to gel for years. It never will. It reached its zenith in some version of RedHat several years ago and has only become more difficult to set up since then. Computers are powerful enough now, but they're also so cheap, there isn't a critical mass of interest.

And Windows? Hah. You can't even remote desktop to a Windows PC without kicking off the user at the console.

For goodness sake, just buy her a REAL MACHINE.

[GrpA]

My wife went through a passing phase a while back ago, so I got her a quad-core P4 w/4gb/500Mb, Radeon 1950 x 2 in crossfire, 41" monitor, Wireless mouse, Keyboard, joysticks, gamepads. Basically everything I wanted in a game machine, while I only had a small netbook (although I could play Farcry on my netbook so it wasn't that bad...)

I thought it was a GREAT idea... She would get tired of it and I get a new gaming machine that she would never let me buy.

Unfortunately, she loved it so much she kept it and I didn't get to "inherit" it all after the passing phase.

But at least she didn't give me any grief over getting (more recently) a much better spec machine, because it cost me a lot less than hers did at the time.

GrpA

Re:For goodness sake, just buy her a REAL MACHINE.

[adolf]

No, not always. It's usually worse.

Most wives seem to put computer hardware into the same bucket as sports cars, motorbikes, and substances (beer or otherwise) -- things that men often want, but never really need. Therefore, buying something new (a mouse, a motherboard, a DVD burner, another terabyte of disk or few gigs of RAM) is often a fight.

There are exceptions, but those are exceptional.

Like this:

First, my wife bought herself a nice dual-core machine. A little under a year later, she asks me to pick something out for myself...and I managed to find a nice quad-core SLI machine for about what she paid for hers. She said OK.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[iamhassi]

"Check out some of the refurbished systems available online and from places like Frys."

Craigslist any 2+ ghz P4 1gb system for ~$100 and you should be able to play City of Heroes since that is the recommended system requirements. Slap in a $100 Radeon 4770 (slashdot's new favorite card) and her system will probably run better than yours.... or you can continue to waste our time. Your choice, choose wisely.

Re:Solution

[schlick]

No. If they are trying to do something stupid or pointless the deserve to be told so. Also people should read this before asking questions.

Specifically this poster should have read this and done number 5.