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

nope

[Anonymous Coward]

nope, I don't.

Crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

You're farking batpoo crazy.

Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

...

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why modded as troll. If you get too cheap on her, she will find another geek who will buy her a separate computer, and HE will end up sharing YOUR BOX! muahahaha!

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Moraelin]

Well, unlike what virgins living in their mom's basement may imagine, sex is only a small part of the time spent together in a relationship.

For a start, you can't keep it up all weekend. (Cue the willy-wavers to come swear they keep it up 24/7;)

Second, a woman tends to get unflattering ideas if your interest in her starts and ends at sex.

Third, humans generally, that is, including men, have more needs than sex. Look at Maslow's pyramid sometime. There's stuff in there like safety, confidence, respect, self-esteem, etc, which are actually antithetical to the role of being just a pussy on legs. You can't get much of a feeling of security of the family if, for all you know, you're just a perfectly fungible sex object in that family.

Basically I dare say that if your wife's interest in you started and ended at sex, you too would probably get insecure and unsatisfied eventually. I mean, what hint would you have that you're not just there until she finds someone with a bigger tool or more stamina?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[franki.macha]

Seriously, stop being sensible on Slashdot, you're spoiling it for the rest of us..

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[x2A]

Well they say sex is like air, is a much bigger deal to people deprived of it :-)

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

But what will they do the other 23 hours and 55 minutes of the day?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Kotoku]

Opps, looks like you are malfunctioning Sexbot "Moraelin". Time to Decommission you!

Bring in Sexbot #4059302 for a rental until the insurance company can compensate the owner.

(But honestly, all your points were very good. ;) )

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

For a start, you can't keep it up all weekend. (Cue the willy-wavers to come swear they keep it up 24/7;)

You know that it is possible to use the tounge aswell?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[zukinux]

[quote]Well, unlike what virgins living in their mom's basement may imagine, sex is only a small part of the time spent together in a relationship.[/quote]

And by that you mean, like, 30 seconds a week, right? :)

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[EatHam]

sex is only a small part of the time spent together in a relationship.

The rest of the time she can cook and clean.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[cayenne8]

"Well, unlike what virgins living in their mom's basement may imagine, sex is only a small part of the time spent together in a relationship.

For a start, you can't keep it up all weekend. (Cue the willy-wavers to come swear they keep it up 24/7;)"

Going with the assumption that this is a young couple, not even married yet, if they were more towards the norm, sex WOULD be one of the primary items on the agenda. I mean, that is normal early in the relationship. Think about dating, you're primarily there to try to get in her pants. And usually...good sex leads the guy to thinking marriage might not be bad 'cause he'd like to keep that to himself on a perm. basis. The deep relationship that you're talking about, that comes along later after you are 'trapped' so to speak in marriage and are stuck together. If it doesnt' develop, the marriage isn't gonna work.

Even with that last part being said...sex in a marriage is STILL a very important part of the relationship. And besides, if you go with most guys side of things anecdotally, you'd better get all the fucking you can before the numptials, 'cause that wedding cake generally cuts her sexual appetite WAY back.

"Third, humans generally, that is, including men, have more needs than sex."

True, but, for heterosexual men, they can satisfy 99% of those needs on their own, but, for sex they need the woman there. Self satisfaction jokes aside. Face it, the old joke of "Why did God give women breasts? So men would talk to them" holds a lot of merit.

If a guy didn't want women for sex, he'd not likely give them much attention otherwise...

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[PopeRatzo]

Cue the willy-wavers to come swear they keep it up 24/7

I'll have you know that thanks to my many years of tantric training, I am capable of...

Oh shit, I forgot my wife reads Slashdot. Excuse me, I have something on the stove.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

If a guy didn't want women for sex, he'd not likely give them much attention otherwise...

Spoken like a true basement virgin

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[PopeRatzo]

Second, a woman tends to get unflattering ideas if...

I can see many Slashdot readers scratching their heads right there, "They get ideas?"

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Dunkirk]

Going with the assumption that this is a young couple, not even married yet, if they were more towards the norm, sex WOULD be one of the primary items on the agenda. I mean, that is normal early in the relationship. Think about dating, you're primarily there to try to get in her pants. And usually...good sex leads the guy to thinking marriage might not be bad 'cause he'd like to keep that to himself on a perm. basis. The deep relationship that you're talking about, that comes along later after you are 'trapped' so to speak in marriage and are stuck together. If it doesnt' develop, the marriage isn't gonna work.

Good graciousness! Absolutely everything about this is backwards! Honestly, this is at the root of everything that's wrong in the world now. And it's not just the obtuseness of how to go about interacting with women, lest you misunderstand me. It's the complete abdication of anything resembling acting like an adult, and taking a long-term, responsible view of the future.

You DATE to find out if it will work. The SEX is just a side benefit. Try thinking with your BRAIN for a change. If the sex is good, you'll think ANY woman would be a good wife, and that's just STUPID. I know. Been there. Done that.

(Full disclosure: Happily married to the perfect wife and mother for 15 years. 3 kids. Deliriously sated with what happens behind closed doors. Did nothing but smooch until we were married.)

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[PopeRatzo]

You know that it is possible to use the tounge..

Is that anything like the "dounge"?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[PopeRatzo]

And by that you mean, like, 30 seconds a week, right? :)

And you only get that much until you're married.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[PopeRatzo]

Self satisfaction jokes aside.

Spoil-sport.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[TheLink]

Probably more like the lounge. Where the couch is.

Where in the "classical western scenario" the male ends up, after offending the female.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[rodrigoandrade]

And you only get that much after you're married.

Fixed.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[CrashandDie]

Safety: condom
Confidence: 40+ minutes
Respect: Waiting for her
Self-esteem: 14+ cm

By your own definition, everything humans need can be attained through sex.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[speciesonly]

I can tell you all that as a girl (check real quick...yeah okay, I am in fact a girl) I would prefer to have sex. I tried to play NWN with my programmer boyfriend only to realize that though we were in the same room together, on the same designated server.....I still needed an upload of something else.

Sex is a HUGE part of EVERYTHING! Girls do want it, trust me. Monogamy, though unnatural (I am a biologist), does not ruin sex. I try on a regular basis to get the goods from my geek, only to be ignored for the computer. When we are together, I know he is thinking about coding on that bitch in the computer room.

Gaming is nice, don't get me wrong. I love my emulator that lets me play FF7 whenever I feel nostalgic, but unplug for a bit and see if you can find someplace more fun to plug that dongle in ;) 3

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[speedtux]

Good graciousness! Absolutely everything about this is backwards!

Has it occurred to you that different people might have different needs and interests in a relationship?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[cayenne8]

"Spoken like a true basement virgin"

Actually, spoken like someone who has actually been around the block a few times...and knows of what he speaks.

I've slept with plenty of women, but, they are no substitute for your real friends.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[sfarmstrong]

I mean, what hint would you have that you're not just there until she finds someone with a bigger tool or more stamina?

Benchmarks?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[bitt3n]

wouldn't full disclosure include the fact that you're a devotee of a religion espousing the sanctity of marriage as a spiritual union as one of its core tenets? Just as people's faith often colors their ideas about nature of the physical world (6K year-old earth, etc.), and blinds them to obvious contradictory evidence, so your notions about marriage might largely be informed by faith rather than experience. I'm gathering this the bible quotation in your sig.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Creepy]

Never had a date or been married, have you?

I think for most couples sex definitely drops off after marriage or shortly after and usually gets worse when you have kids and a tight schedule.

I won't even get into sex drive after/during cancer, tumor removal, or other diseases, and yes I am familiar with it because my wife had part of her cervix removed (tumors) and her mom died of pancreatic cancer (and her stepdad remarried a month after her death, so the loyalty wasn't really there at the end).

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Hatta]

The SEX is just a side benefit.

No, sex is the whole point. Of course, you need a compatible personality too, but THAT's the side benefit. Good sex with a girl you don't like won't last. But relationship with a sweet loving girl who won't have sex is a complete non-starter. I mean, if you're content with masturbating, why not just be single?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Zirnike]

"but unplug for a bit and see if you can find someplace more fun to plug that dongle in ;)"

So, did it work, or is he still on the computer? :)

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[paazin]

Good graciousness! Absolutely everything about this is backwards!

Has it occurred to you that different people might have different needs and interests in a relationship?

Yeah! If I just want meaningless sex all day with a dumb bimbo, it's my damn right as an American to do so.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[cayenne8]

"You DATE to find out if it will work. The SEX is just a side benefit. Try thinking with your BRAIN for a change. If the sex is good, you'll think ANY woman would be a good wife, and that's just STUPID. I know. Been there. Done that."

Err...I think you have it backwards as far as how most men do it (and nothing wrong with that).

Most guys are not out looking for a relationship or 'brains' when they are on the 'hunt'. I mean, I've never heard a guy look across a bar, spot a woman and go "GOD, I gotta go over and talk to her, she has the best sense of humor and personality I've ever seen".

No, he goes over to talk to her at the onset, because she is physically attractive to him, and he'd potentially like to bang her.

If that keeps his interest long enough to get to know her, then the brains, personality and compatibility come into play, and yes, that's part of what you need if you are indeed looking for a long term relationship. No, you don't marry just for sex, but, like another poster said, marrying a girl that is a great girl, all around but isn't into sex (and if you ARE), is a recipe for disaster too. If she's not good and willing in bed, I don't care if she has the best personality in the world, I'm not keeping her around for a permanent relationship possibility.

But, everyone is different. I'm not meaning to slight you...but, I'm just saying that possibly your views and how it works in general for everyone (male) is an outlier. Hey, the world needs guys like you to give the rest of us a good name.

:)

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[MikeBabcock]

... or that the vast majority of relationships (including marriages) end poorly, so maybe going by your needs is a poor way to get a good one?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[TopherC]

This is far off topic but I'll bite.

I think Dunkirk has it exactly right here. While I can guess that his religious beliefs (which I don't presume to really know about) are at least not inconsistent with his post, you're trying to use religion as an excuse to dismiss the ideas automatically instead of addressing them on their own merit.

I too have been married for 15 years, and I think my relationship with my wife is strong because it's based on friendship and mutual support, not sex. We both enjoy sex but with kids and madly busy schedules, it would never be enough to keep us together. We both still reminisce about life before kids, when we could actually date now and then. Obviously if a better sex life was my main desire I'd drop my inconvenient commitments and run off with someone else. That has nothing to do with how good the sex was in the beginning of our relationship. If I were to have chosen to marry her for the sex, even if she were playgirl of the year then, I'd be dissatisfied by now.

We've been through a lot in the past year especially since I gave up what was pretty close to my dream job in order to support her professional needs and the needs of our kids. In other words, I think one needs to love their spouse so much that what benefits one's self is much less important than what benefits their family. She has done the same for me in the past.

I *know* I sound "preachy" here, but why? I'm not arguing that friendship trumps sex because of any kind of right relationship with God or, far worse, some fear of afterlife or hell. I guess the only reason this sounds like a religious argument is because we hear this same kind of message from the religious right wing. We then tend to accept or reject the idea based on other opinions not even remotely related to the relevant arguments. This same thing happens all the time in politics, and it bothers me.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[tutak]

Haha, you can only hope so, or just order pizza and buy a dishwasher.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Nick Ives]

From the summary:

I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase.

Clearly this setup is just going to be used infrequently as a distraction from the otherwise non-stop sex this couple is having. This is to be expected considering the couple is still only engaged.

After a few years of marriage I'm sure True Vox will be back asking for the cheapest build that will run "The Sims 3" and all possible future expansions so that he can get some time away from the woman he clearly loves and to stop the arguments about whether she gets to play The Sims or he gets to play Team Fortress 2.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[bitt3n]

you're trying to use religion as an excuse to dismiss the ideas automatically instead of addressing them on their own merit.

His argument is based on his own experience. I'm suggesting that his obvious religious views may color his perceptions of that experience, in the same way that a creationist's beliefs may color his views of evidence that an impartial mind might consider to support evolution. This is no different from questioning whether any data source might be influenced by some factor extraneous to the phenomenon being studied.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Good graciousness! Absolutely everything about this is backwards! Honestly, this is at the root of everything that's wrong in the world now.

Yep. If there wasn't any sex, there would be no people and, hence, no problems! Abstinence for world peace! Err... Slashdot for world peace?

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[chrysrobyn]

Second, a woman tends to get unflattering ideas if your interest in her starts and ends at sex.

I've been married for 9 years, together for 13. Any ideas you have about suggesting people change their standards mid-relationship should be tempered. My drive is significantly higher than my wife's. From time to time, I get some thought into my head that I should be more sensitive and a little less aggressive. Every time, this leads to her having confidence problems because something changed and she has no idea what it is. Pouting continues until my experiment with sensitivity ends. She knows what she has in her skull is everything I want in a life mate, but it's important for her to know her body occupies a certain percentage of my brains too.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[bensafrickingenius]

"14+ cm"

How in the world did I never think of measuring in *centimeters* before reading your post? Brilliant! Genius! Thank you! Thank you!

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Simetrical]

And by that you mean, like, 30 seconds a week, right? :)

And you only get that much until you're married.

I realize you're joking, but still, this meme just isn't true. Married people have significantly more sex than others. See, e.g., Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study. (Money required, but I was able to get it e-mailed for free by providing my college e-mail address.) For instance, the chart on page 20 indicates that 44% of the general population has sex on at least a weekly basis, 56% of married people, and 43% of people who have never married. One of the authors' findings is "unmarried people say they have much less sex than those who are married".

Of course, usual disclaimers about self-reporting apply. Strangely, if you add up all the heterosexual males' reported sexual activity, it ends up being much higher than the sum of the heterosexual females' reported sexual activity . . . but still, there seems to be no reason to doubt this specific point.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe not. How do you know which of the different kinds of relationships are more likely to "end poorly"?

I know one thing: without good sex, a relationship definitely isn't going to work for me.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that if the dumb bimbo is your fiancee, the sex isn't meaningless at all, because having sex with your fiancee is an important aspect of a normal relationship. Besides, being a "dumb bimbo" doesn't mean someone isn't also a nice person or a good partner.

Re:Try having sex with your Fiance instead

[16Chapel]

If the women you're sleeping with are not your real friends, it's no wonder you don't like spending time with them.

seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

stop being a jew and go buy a computer and a 80 dollar graphics card

Re:seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

I support this message.

Re:seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

iNo really! It's City of Fucking Heroes!
It won't run on s machine with the power of a 7 year old desktop with integrated graphics. BFD.

RDP

[thefear]

A) Just have her remote desktop into your computer, log in as another user, and play that way
B) fiance... fiance.... SPEND TIME WITH HER

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Cant do that without Windows Server. You've never been able to do that (well, it was in a beta of XP and I think in a beta of a SP once, but it got removed) on a desktop edition of Windows.

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.

Re:RDP

[nschubach]

A) Just have her remote desktop into your computer, log in as another user, and play that way

B) fiance... fiance.... SPEND TIME WITH HER

A) Last time I checked, RDP has trouble with accelerated video. Has this changed?

[...and why is it always about "her" wants? Get a two way relationship for heaven's sake.]

Re:RDP

[AnEducatedNegro]

Or just use a modified termsrv.dll

Now run along kiddo, this is grown folks business.
aEN

Re:RDP

[Trouvist]

Check out ThinAnywhere... its amazing. (Albeit expensive unless using it for large-scale applications)

Re:RDP

[arbiter1]

i Remote desktop 4 windows 2003 servers atm, trust me no way in hell you are gonna play games over that its just way to slow to support such an operation.

Re:RDP

[Kamokazi]

RDP is NOT designed for 3D Games :-)

Really, the best option will be a second computer. You can buy great video cards just shy of $100, throw it in any computer with a PCI-Express slot, and be able to play CoH on pretty high settings.

Re:RDP

[binarylarry]

Why not just link a torrent to a Win2k3 iso and crack?

Re:RDP

[moronoxyd]

Actually, only Windows XP Home does not support a remote desktop connection.
In Windows XP Prof. you just have to change one single registry setting
(HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Terminal Server/fDenyTSConnections set to 0)

Re:RDP

[Molochi]

You're machine was born Pwnd. Nuf said.

Re:RDP

[thsths]

> because Slashdot eats my unicode for breakfast.

In theory, the accent should get mapped to ISO8859-1 - no need for unicode. Let' see: é.

And for the OP: forget it. It is possible with certain OS if you have low demands, but I think 3D acceleration never works on both monitors. Getting a slightly oldish PC and adding a cheap mid range graphics card would be a better approach.

Re:RDP

[NightLamp]

step 1: buy lots of old computers
step 2: buy some serial cables
step 3: beowulf the computers
step 4: use the rs232 cables with appropriate mices.
step 5: make sure you are using linux
step 6: direct the serial signals appropriately
step 7: either use a vm xp or linux to play the game
step *: never give up trying to make it work, remember, your time is infinite - spending $300 for a dell vostro is like spelling the word "DEFEAT" in a snowbank with dead penguin bodies.

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

I would venture a guess grown folks would know RDP doesn't support accelerated graphics.

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed. é is not é

Re:RDP

[RawsonDR]

I would mod you up but you deserve a trophy for that insight!

Well done sir.

Re:RDP

[x2A]

But IIRC on XP a remote desktop connection will kick out the person sitting at the machine; it will only allow one person to be logged in at a time. When the remote desktop logs out, you get control of the screen back (or if you type the login password to relogin, they get kicked out)

Re:RDP

[Alexandra Erenhart]

Believe me, if you want to keep your relationship out of fights for a computer, get a new one. I say it by experience. You *do not want* yet another reason to go to bed mad at her, or she mad at you :P

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just wrong. Yes, it will let you connect multiple people to the same computer. However, you'll need another computer with which to connect from, completely defeating the purpose.

On top of this, it doesn't allow any sort of 3d acceleration, and if you somehow get it to work it would be a slideshow. Your grown folks business of hacking DLL files is dated, lame, and childish.

The posters only option is in Linux with multiple GPUs. MPX will allow it on a single screen, otherwise it's separate X servers.

Re:RDP

[sortius_nod]

You're machine was born Pwnd. Nuf said.

Your ability to utilise the english language was born pwnd. Nuf Said.

Re:RDP

[somersault]

You don't need to go into the registry, it's a setting in System properties (right click on my computer then properties, or control panel then system), then the Remote tab. There's a tickbox there that probably does the same thing as your registry setting, but it also allows you to specify which users are allowed access.

As x2A says though, it will indeed kick off the local user.

Re:RDP

[theeddie55]

a reasonably modern graphics card can do 3D acc on two monitors (I use a nVidia GT9500 to play flight sim on two screens) but trying to play two different games like this is unlikely.

Re:RDP

[jonbryce]

Windows 2003 isn't really suitable for gaming. The graphics performance is pretty lousy.

Re:RDP

[jonbryce]

Lets try é - é. Yes, that works.

Re:RDP

[TheLink]

But he's allegedly a slashdotter.

Why doesn't he want another computer too?

Especially when he thinks there's a high chance she won't want it soon (which makes it easier for him to take it off her hands :) ).

Re:RDP

[mlk]

How about both games running in windowed mode?

Thou. you would still have the issue with different controllers to solve.

Re:RDP

[KUHurdler]

I've used this software long ago, and can say that it works using 1 single XP Pro computer. Perhaps this is what the OP is looking for.

BeTwin (By ThinSoft) It uses XP's fast user switching to allow two users simultaneously on two different monitors.

At the time, I was looking for a way to have two users input at the same time in one microsoft word document (basically two cursors, so two people could edit the same document onscreen simultaneously). I never found it. But I did find this cool little app along the way.

Re:RDP

[Hobbs114]

I'm an immortal accountant, you insensitive clod!

Re:RDP

[cptdondo]

As someone who actually does this - I have one system with 3 monitors, another with 2 - it's possible. Is it easy? No.

First of all, all I know is linux. I have no clue about Windows.

If you have a separate GPU per monitor, you can get full acceleration. There's some voodoo you have to pull off to separate the GPUs in xorg, but the info is out there.

If you have a dual-dvi card with a single GPU, you won't get acceleration on either one as you have to run Xephyr on top of your X server.

If it's just a "passing phase", I'd go down to your local computer recycler, buy a relatively recent box for $100, and be done with it.

Right now Xorg is in a state of flux and maybe in 6 months or a year true multiuser will arrive with the rootless X server, but I'm not holding my breath. The xorg devs are doing a fantastic job, but it's a big job....

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

from from from from from from

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

slashcode: 1
you: 0

beaten by a perl script ...

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the feminine form also has the accent: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fianc%C3%A9e.

Re:RDP

[twidarkling]

The posters only option is in Linux with multiple GPUs. MPX will allow it on a single screen, otherwise it's separate X servers.

To quote your first line "This is just wrong." He wants to *game.* What's more, specific games. City of Heroes doesn't have a *nix client, and running two instances in WINE is going to kill pretty much any system.

Re:RDP

[Magic5Ball]

Yeah, because freeing memory and CPU from not having to run the Teletubbies UI from XP, and being able to quota and throttle processes and services really deprives the game of the resources it needs to run.

If you spend 10 minutes Googling intelligently, DX and video drivers work fine in 2K3 for gaming as long as you didn't cheap out on some B-grade Super Wonder Color Over 9000 OEM card from the bottom of the clearance bin at Wal-Mart.

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Hence the "first e".

Re:RDP

[iSzabo]

if you want to keep your relationship out of fights for a computer, get a new one

I agree, time to break up.

Re:RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, you can do it with a single GPU. I've done it myself, a long time ago, on an FX5200 - because it has two independent outputs, each fed by independent hardware-accelerated framebuffers, you can actually run an instance of X on each output and get 3D acceleration on both.

Re:RDP

[dredwerker]

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

I read that as unicorn - it made me smile.

Syntax error

[Anonymous Coward]

No closing parenthesis

Parenthetical exuberance

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you could auction your extra parentheses and buy an Alienware with the proceeds?

Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Phizzle]

Check out some of the refurbished systems available online and from places like Frys. You can get some raging deals on a solid mid-range box. Thin Client is absolutely abysmal as a gaming solution. This way you two can share a hobby and not drive each other nuts.

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:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Anonymous Coward]

Craigslist any 2+ ghz P4 1gb system for ~$100 and you should be able to play City of Heroes

2Ghz 1GB is in no way useful... it's my own desktop's specs. (Well, 1.9Ghz to be exact.)

There used to be a time when playing CoH with a Geforce FX5200 was pretty smooth, back in 2005. When expansions like City of Villains came out, the engine changed a lot, and all the curvy landscapes bogged the PC down even if I was alone on the nearby map, using the superspeed power. The result was my needing to run 800x600 and 16 bit color, with 3D settings at like 50% detail.

Even without Heroes, day to day operations are slow on XP SP2 (even 2.0 versions of firefox run very slowly, let alone play running are very ). I'm not sure if it's just Dell's choice of architecture for my Dimension 2300. The fact that the machine has only one processor, makes things that I could do easily 5 years ago be a pain. I'm not in favor for upgrading and replacing old machines. The problem is that with Flash and Firefox forcing you to upgrade every 8 months, you end up with a world where even clean installs are too slow to handle the overhead of all the bloat out there.

At 2Ghz, even dual core, high-demand games such as any recent MMO will not be decently playable. Even if it plays OK today, the next set of patches can bring upgrades that kill your spiffy idle megahertz.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Anonymous Coward]

He will most likely have to buy a new P4 motherboard that supports PCIe as well. I only know of one (which I have bought myself) made by Biostar. It only has a single PCIe 16x slot so he can forget about using any dual slot video cards on it. He will also most likely need to buy a new power supply since most P4 power supplies will not handle the power load, which in turn probably entails buying a new case to house it in. I had to buy a new case with a 550 watt supply with 24 amps on the 12v rail just to support a Geforce 8600GTS on my old P4 system. He will probably also need to buy a monitor because I doubt a $100 computer will come with one.

In the end, it's not worth the hassle. He would be better off just running two instances on a dual core system, possibly with 2 video cards or just buying a brand new computer and giving her his old one.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[BikeHelmet]

Or he could just get one new. Newegg sometimes has CPUs as cheap as $30, and I guarantee they're more powerful than a 2ghz P4.

CPU - $30
Mobo - $50 or $60.
PSU - $40 (I never skimp on these)
Case - $? (Anything with free shipping; those things can be heavy!)
RAM - $10 (do you need more than 1GB?)
HDD - $40 (or salvage one from an old computer)
Videocard - $70 (Newegg had 9800 GTs going for $70 yesterday!)

Brand new, and it comes to around or under $250. Toss in some peripherals like keyboard/mouse/speakers and you're at $280-$350. (depending on your tastes)

Now add a cheap monitor if you need one. (Either off craigslist, or from newegg for around $100)

Brand new doesn't actually cost that much - but I suppose $100 is better than $300.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Kokuyo]

Either you people have crazy hardware prices, or you and me really have very different ideas about skimping... 40 bucks for a PSU is cheap-ass, second grade, fell-off-a-truck stuff in my book.

But I agree. This problem does have only one solution. Gaming costs money, but in case of a PC you at least have a choice about exactly how expensive you want it to get.

Nobody would think to ask how to have two people game a single player game on a XBox 360 either, right? Neither should one try with a PC.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[noundi]

Seriously, 1GB RAM for 10 bucks doesn't exist. Plus going all budget like this usually ends up in a shit system worth slightly less than shit itself. It would be better to buy a second hand PC which intially was powerful, instead.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[paganizer]

Really?
My kids system has a Nvidia 6600 256mb, 1gb of ram, AMD 2000XP and they don't have any real problems running CoH, it runs as well if not better than on my Core Duo with a Ge7400 512mb and 2gb RAM.
Of course, their system is Win2k while the core duo is XP, so that might explain it; I don't have good benchmarks on the XP machine for CoH because I just tested out the game (I thought it didn't compare well to Freedom Force), but it is, of course, a bigger resource hog than the Win2k machine. The 6600 is also a pretty kick ass video card.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Autonom]

Or just buy one of these http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=53... It even comes with the benefit of being environmentally friendly. IE, soon you'll, become obsessed with the smell of your farts, buy a hybrid, shave your head, and grow a soul patch, wear crocheted scarves, masturbate to "An inconvenient truth," or... not...

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[OrangeTide]

512MB DDR2s are literally available for $5 new, two of those would be 1GB.

And yes, better to spend a little money than create a bunch of problems that must be solved with a shit system.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[rve]

The OP is not looking for an useful answer but just successfully using AskSlashdot to advertise their product to a large audience for free:

I have seen one solution that might work

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[mlts]

I agree on the PSU. The PSU is the foundation of the computer, and if something goes wrong with it, it can completely fry every other component on the system. I'd get an Antec, PC Power & Cooling, or Corsair PSU, with a large amount of wattage. 300 watt PSUs doesn't mean components are getting the current they need on all rails when the PSU is near capacity, so its always good to leave a lot of headroom, especially because people don't factor in that external USB stuff needs power. IMHO, $50 is the lowest I'd go for a power supply, and if its a machine that will have a bunch of drives, I'd go with 800 to 1000 watts just in case.

Another advantage is that quality power supplies are silent, which makes using a machine a lot more pleasurable.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[x2A]

Err... get process explorer and start shutting things down that you don't need running. View your system services (start -> run -> 'services.msc') and disable unneeded services from starting up automatically with boot. My Dell laptop is a P4-M 1.7Ghz with 1.25G RAM, running windows 2003, and it copes no sweat. I was running a 5 way browser test on a project I'm working on not too long back (IE8, Safari4, Chrome, FF3.1, and Opera (forget the version)), all running at the same time, no problem. (short summary: ie8 had the smallest memory footprint, safari4 and chrome rendered and ran javascript the fastest). There's no reason why a P4 with a gig of ram should struggle with browsing. I'm not a gamer* so can't speak for that.

(*tho civ3 has taken days of mine in a row, but have banned myself from that because of it!)

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[BikeHelmet]

Either you people have crazy hardware prices, or you and me really have very different ideas about skimping... 40 bucks for a PSU is cheap-ass, second grade, fell-off-a-truck stuff in my book.

I was lucky enough to get a Corsair VX450 on sale for $40. The prices seem to have gone up - but it has free shipping right now, and newegg always jacks the prices up on free shipping items.

A 9800GT though will not stress a VX450.

You're right though; $60-100 for a PSU would be more appropriate if you plan to have a beefy videocard or multiple videocards.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[BikeHelmet]

...and if its a machine that will have a bunch of drives, I'd go with 800 to 1000 watts just in case.

I used to feel the same way about PSUs, but then I picked up a Kill-a-Watt off newegg, and checked how much power my computers were actually using. Now I realize I don't need nearly as much PSU as I thought.

Corsair HX620 (very efficient)
Athlon X2 @ 2.8ghz
Asus M3N78 Pro
2x1GB DDR2-800
Asus 8800GS
4x Seagate 320GB HDD
1x DVD

Samsung Syncmaster 940BW
2.0 Speakers

Power consumption when playing Left4Dead? 170 watts from the wall. If I shut my monitor off, it drops to ~136w. If I shut my speakers off, ~128w. If I get out of Left4Dead and leave it at the desktop, only ~90 watts. (though once I turn the Monitor/Speakers back on, it's back up to ~130w)

I think the efficiency on most cheap PSUs must really blow; if you go with a quality Corsair one, you really don't draw a lot of juice...

But then again, Athlon X2's and 8800GS's are relatively low power, and Asus makes very efficient boards.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[paganizer]

I dropped $1700 on my work laptop a couple of years back; an HP DV8230US. i wanted something that could do pretty much anything, either sitting at my home or in a Motel room when I'm on a contract. I spent the money I needed to spend.
However, my HOME systems, including my gaming system, are bargain bin; I get the cheapest parts i can get that WORK. My Gaming system has parts in it that date back to 1997 (It did have a Floppy from my 1993 386DX-40, but it died last year). I replace things as they break or are no longer capable of doing what I need them to do, at which point they trickle down to less powerful systems around the house. My latest purchase? My $30 Power Supply, which I bought in 2003, was getting flaky; I bought a new case and 480W Power Supply for $40 on sale, before that I got a deal ($15) on a PC3200 1gb RAM stick, to add to my 2 512mb PC2700; Before than, a 400GB SATA drive ($40) to replace a dead 40GB Maxtor IDE (from 2002), before that, I got a pair of Nvidia 6600 256mb AGP cards for $50 (for both) on Amazon, etc, etc.
I don't have problems running anything I want to run; i was a little nervous about SPORE (would it be the hardware? or another Windows 2000 installer block?), but absolutely no problems, whatsoever. I do have to run "Attack on Pearl Harbor" on the dualboot windows 2008, but thats it. If I was a FPS maniac, it might be different, but I doubt it.

My point: $40 for a PSU would be overpriced to me. and, since decades of experience has shown me that spending more money than you have to for components is foolish, I have to say it would probably be foolish for anyone who has the ability to swap out components at need, also.

I WILL have to spend some money soon, one of my productivity apps has come out with a 64-bit, multiprocessor AND GPU aware version, which means that my AMD XP3000+ will get to make my sons game system better, and I'll have to get a new motherboard & CPU(s), and might even consider getting a new video card. But it's giving up Windows 2000 thats gonna hurt; Windows 2008 Server (which, surprisingly, doesn't suck) is my next step (unless someone out there wants to slip me a copy of the fully developed but never released 64-bit patch for win2k?.....).

But as for the actual Topic... Sun Virtualbox, as of Jan 29th, 2009, has virtualized Hardware acceleration for both OpenGL and Direct3D. I have no idea what the requirements would be, or if 2 guests can do it at once.

And, I VERY CLEARLY remember doing this on a Win98SE system with 2 Voodoo cards back in 99, using only microsoft supplied software and no extra hardware aside from the extra mouse, keyboard and voodoo. but I can find no reference to this anywhere; I might break out an old Win98SE system and give it a try.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that such an old computer would be able to use a new video card. Pentium 4 systems would probably only have AGP and PCI, and most (if not all) new video cards run on PCI-Express. The CPU would probably be the bottleneck in any case.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[TheLink]

In general a 1000W power supply running at 10-15% load won't be very efficient.

They're only efficient at a certain operating load range[1].

So yes buy quality, but that does NOT mean buy higher rating.

My Gaming PC only uses about 150-200W. I got a 500W supply and that's probably overkill already.

[1] http://compreviews.about.com/od/cases/a/PSUEfficiency.htm

"In addition, that 85% efficiency unit may only reach that percentage when it is at a 50% power load. When the unit is at 25 or 75% power loads, it may only have a 70% or lower level of efficiency. "

Yes the newer power supplies can be 80% efficient for a wider load range, but if you know how much wattage you need, just go about double and that's good enough - then you can buy the cheaper and still efficient (for that load) power supplies.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably because the 6600 is 2 to 3 times more powerful than your 7400. The Geforce 7400 is a very low end, integrated GPU that is not suitable for gaming.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Corporate Troll]

2+GHz P4s/512Meg are commonly found in dumpsters/recycling centres by now.

You're advocating spending 200$ for a system (Base purchase + Graphics card) where 300$ gets you a more capable *new* system. Also, you conveniently forget that P-IV class machines typically have AGP slots and those are hard to get these days. Your link goes even to a PCIe graphics card which is absolutely useless in these kind of machines.

Believe me, I'm a dumpster diver.... Spending 50$ on a dumpster diven machine, is pretty much the maximum I can recommend. More gets your quickly in the domain of "new computers" or "capable second hand computers". Usually, combining two or more dumpster diven computers gives you one capable machine (and a bunch of spare parts)... and that entirely for free.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Corporate Troll]

You should check your PC. My wifes PC is a 6 year old P-IV and works just fine in day to day operations with XP Pro SP3. We run Firefox with flash and it isn't a problem.

Now, my Asus EEE PC 701 4G is a bit on the slow side running Debian Lenny, but it remains usable.

I've used XP Pro SP2 on a P-III 600MHz machine and while not stellar it was definitely usable. (It had 512Meg RAM, that's why it ran ok... less would have been a nightmare)

Personally, I think you have other problems with your PC. That or, you have a way better machine at work and you're too used to that speed.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[True Vox]

No, I am in no way connected with them, I work for a small direct mail firm in Vermont. I have never used their product, and I can not say if it good, middling or poor.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Lumpy]

Exactly. a P4 will NOT struggle browsing. in fact my 3.5ghz single core (no HT enabled) P4 Kicks the crap out of all dualcore gaming rigs. Dualcore and Quadcore is useless for gaming.. raw Ghz is what is needed and my really old computer kicks the crap out of the new stuff in gaming.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[MrAngryForNoReason]

My point: $40 for a PSU would be overpriced to me. and, since decades of experience has shown me that spending more money than you have to for components is foolish

It only seems foolish until the day your cheap PSU blows, frying your motherboard, graphics card, RAM and processor.

Even without that possibility cheap power supplies generally do a terrible job of regulating the power which can cause all kinds of stability problems when for instance it can't maintain the correct voltage for your RAM.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[TuaAmin13]

Exactly. a P4 will NOT struggle browsing. in fact my 3.5ghz single core (no HT enabled) P4 Kicks the crap out of all dualcore gaming rigs. Dualcore and Quadcore is useless for gaming.. raw Ghz is what is needed and my really old computer kicks the crap out of the new stuff in gaming.

Try running SupCom sometime soon and let me know what you think of multithreaded gaming.

Anyhow; OP, isn't there some program that lets you stream your games to other computers (and consoles) over LAN. Basically everyone was screaming "CRYSIS ON PS3 OMG!!!" Find that program, and have your badass computer stream to her netbook and then run natively on your box.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[TuaAmin13]

If you do happen to have a AGP slot in the machine, Gigabyte is selling a HD 4650

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Dunkirk]

I had an underspec-ed, but GOOD, Antec PS for my dual Athlon motherboard. I fried both SCSI hard drives TWICE, a video card, sound card, and finally, the SCSI controller, before I realized that it just didn't have enough juice. (Everything but the controller was under warranty.) That being said, modern systems use a lot less energy these days, but now I don't ever skimp on a PS....

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Anonymous Coward]

In my 30 years of computer ownership, use and admin jobs I have never had a power supply fry any components. I have had a few of them die, but even the cheapest of them tend to outlive the upgrade cycles.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[markov_chain]

PSU is cheap enough that it's worth it to me to spend a little bit extra to get a PSU which is quiet. This means it has a large diameter fan, and has plenty of power. Along those same lines, I like to get humongous CPU coolers with as much copper as possible so I can run without a CPU fan.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[evol262]

Yeah! Most instructions per clock, better branch prediction, a shorter pipeline, and fewer cache misses are for suckers!

Seriously, I take it you haven't actually looked at Task Manager on a dual core (quad-core is, admittedly not that useful for games) system playing anything Source based/etc. Just check anything on this. It's a little outdated, but so is your CPU.

Nothing wrong with a P4 for a lot of tasks, but you're deluding yourself if you think it performs better than new CPUs.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[MrAngryForNoReason]

Well, components as a rule use less energy but it depends on the system. 1000Watt PSUs may seem ridiculous but if you are running two high spec graphics cards then they suck up a lot of juice. Couple that with a RAID array of 10000rpm drives and it all starts adding up.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[WinstonWolfIT]

lol frys. Fail much?

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[michrech]

www.newegg.com part number N82E16820148240. 9.99, free shipping, and no tax. 5 egg rating @ 15 reviews.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[bendodge]

My specs are similar to yours, and I don't have any problem playing games like Command & Conquer 3. Methinks you need to clean out your background processes and services.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Acer500]

Craigslist any 2+ ghz P4 1gb system for ~$100 and you should be able to play City of Heroes

2Ghz 1GB is in no way useful... it's my own desktop's specs. (Well, 1.9Ghz to be exact.)

Even without Heroes, day to day operations are slow on XP SP2 (even 2.0 versions of firefox run very slowly, let alone play running are very ).

Eh? I have a 2 GHz AMD Sempron with 1 GB of RAM at home, and it works smoothly. Not sure what you're trying to do, but I surf the web, do some occasional programming and play Magic Online (nothing 3D).

I suspect it would be slow for 3D games, but not for everyday stuff (and I open a TON of tabs on Firefox 3).

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[DarthVain]

I second that. I get a kick out of what I hear these days about PSUs... Retarded. People going out and buying 700, 800, 900, even 1000 watt systems, is basically a waste.

If you could see what I used to run on my old Dell machine which had a measly 230 watt PSU, I am talking like 6 HD, dual proc, dual optical, and enough USB crap to sink a ship.

The difference is between quality and crap (no idea if Dell is any good these days, likely not).

My last build I did a LOT of research on PSU, and believe me there is NOT a lot out there. There are a handful of gurus out there that know what they are talking about, I mean like that I could find from scourging the whole internet. However what information they had was spot on.

First the number they sick on the side of the box (900WATT!!!) is pretty much useless. Also brand names mean next to nothing. So good luck! lol. Basically there are only a few manufactures in China that build them ALL. They are then re-branded to whatever the buyer wants. Some manufactures make better PSU that others, some use higher end components, however it can be difficult to figure out which is which.

Efficiency is about twice as important as actually stated wattage (which is usually a lie anyway), and stability is about twice as important as efficiency. What this means is that when you computer goes from no load, to heavy load, and the PSU starts sucking power and shunting it to your components, how much does it fluctuate? You might be surprised to see how badly some of these oscillate up and down, and those dips can cause system failure and even damage components in severe cases.

Anyway thats as far as I want to go into it as it is a pretty complex thing, but there is a community out there though hard to find. I know I was pretty blown away by the truth about PSUs. Most of the companies mislead, and outright lie on their specifications it is pretty absurd.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[compwizrd]

Any higher end options than the X1550 in PCI? Have a P4-2.8 on a Supermicro P4SCA, and need the 2 ISA slots(yes, a p4 with ISA!) for a CMM system.

I see there's Socket 775 boards available now, with PCI-E and ISA, http://www.ibasetechnology.net/mb886.html, but i need two ISA slots... nice board otherwise.

ibase also sells some with two isa slots, but they're pentium 4 only, no c2d.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[x2A]

This is mostly true, although I have in the past found some software which works better on single processor than dual due to poor locking code/design covering data structures which was not there in the single threaded version, but that got fixed up (it wasn't a game tho). Most games should be able to benefit from a second core to an extent greater than they are hindered by the addition of the locking code. These days there shouldn't be any excuse for not knowing about different locking methods available, race conditions, minimising critical sections etc.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[mzs]

That's kind of a good idea in principle but it ended-up being more trouble than it was worth for me. So I got a P4 box with AGP and room for 2 GB of RAM for $50. I thought all was going to be well. The first thing was that the PS/2 ports did not work, so I scrounged-up some USB input. Then when I opened it up there was the back of the power supply too close to the AGP connector so I could not find any decent AGP card short enough to fit. I got some extra ram and it became the web browsing computer. It's using integrated graphics.

Then I got another one with a bigger case for $100. I got an AGP card (I think it was a 6600, it was whatever was the last best available chipset for AGP from eVGA). It turned-out that the PSU was garbage so I needed to get a new one but since the P4 is so hungry and the AGP card relatively so, that meant I needed a pretty heavy duty power supply. I get it working, cool. Okay it only has 512MB of by today's standards pretty slow memory, a small HD, and a CD-ROM drive (not DVD reader, not even CD writer, in fact it could not even read CDRs!). Okay so I upgrade all that. And then it just is not all that great in the end for games anyway. I gave it away to some family.

I ended-up making a beefy new 4 core AMD64 box with PCIe for $750 (yes including retail Vista, yes I was too late due to my penny pinching) and even threw in two tuners, a penny saved a dollar lost I guess.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[evol262]

While true to a point, pinning it to one core generally resolves that. It's a fairly accurate generalization to say that any one core of an AM2 Athlon64 or Core2 will beat the hell out of a P4 even on single threaded performance (and due to improved cache coherency, pinning isn't strictly necessary).

Most games should be able to benefit more, yes, large projects aren't quite so easy to synchronize, and they aren't that parallelizable (you've got AI, physics, and...?).

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[default luser]

Exactly. a P4 will NOT struggle browsing. in fact my 3.5ghz single core (no HT enabled) P4 Kicks the crap out of all dualcore gaming rigs. Dualcore and Quadcore is useless for gaming.. raw Ghz is what is needed and my really old computer kicks the crap out of the new stuff in gaming.

No. Take a look at this review here. The EE 965 is 3.73 GHz dual-core, and the Core 2 Duo E6700 is 2.66 GHz. If you extrapolate the results to account for the 1.4 difference in clock speed, the Core 2 Duo E6700 is %65 to %75 faster than the P4, clock-for-clock.

And just in case you don't believe me, you can check the gaming performance, which is single-threaded. When not GPU-limited, the Core 2 is up to %110 faster than the P4 at the same clock speed.

For general use, you would need a 4.4 GHz Pentium 4 to match a Core 2 Duo at 2.66 GHz (not all that fast today).

For gaming, you would need a 5.6 GHz Pentium 4 to match a Core 2 Duo at 2.66 GHz.

For reference, you can get a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo (even faster!) here for just over $100. Not a lot of dough for blistering performance, eh?

P.S. if you are disabling HT on your P4, you are doing yourself a disservice. The I/O latency on the P4 is high, and the branch mispredict penalty is huge. Every time this happens, the P4 HT can switch threads in a single clock tick, while it will otherwise waste dozens of clocks purging the pipeline / waiting on I/O. This is exceptionally good for multitasking, but is also good for newer games that actually use 2 or more threads. Sure, it took a hit in older single-threaded games, but newer games should show a perforance increase with HT enabled.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[csartanis]

Yep... my desktop uses 220W at max load and thats because my video card (gf7950GX2) is a power hog. Replace that with something current and it'll likely drop to under 175W

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Kaldor]

Exactly. a P4 will NOT struggle browsing. in fact my 3.5ghz single core (no HT enabled) P4 Kicks the crap out of all dualcore gaming rigs. Dualcore and Quadcore is useless for gaming.. raw Ghz is what is needed and my really old computer kicks the crap out of the new stuff in gaming.

Yeah, and I have some beach front property to sell you.... A P4 cannot hold a candle to Core2s, i7s, or Phenom2s. I have a Q9650 and an E8400, both @ 4ghz. A P4 cant touch them even in single threaded apps.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Darinbob]

I tried City of Heroes last hear for the month that came with the purchase. It really stressed out that computer and graphics card that I had at the time. The earlier hero side with simpler graphics (square buildings) had worse performance than the newer villain side that had more interesting visuals. The problem seems to be the age of the game and graphics engine not being very well optimized

So my concern trying to use one computer for this, if a way could be found, is that it would really need a lot of horsepower to do right.

Second concern about sharing the network connection with two streams that both want high bandwidth and low latency through a single affordable network provider could be tricky. I know the biggest complaint I hear in MMOs with performance tends to be the network lag.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Anonymous Coward]

I blew out an Antec 380 when I hooked up an internal SCSI DLT Drive. When I say blew out, I mean it shot sparks and fire out the back and stunk up the house with the smoke. Luckily my mobo didn't have any damage.

The PSU had been running fine for 6 months before that.

It really depends on what you are running in your box. I do a yearly rebuild and decided I didn't want to keep buying power supplies each time requirements changed, so I got a 750w high quality modular PSU so I can run up to 4 video cards in cross fire and the tape drive, disk drives etc.

It comes apart with screws so I can take the cage off and clean it when necessary. As well if your PSU has a lot of headroom it will last longer because it doesn't run as hot, which reduces temperature stress on the components.

Since it's modular if the motherboard standards for plugs change again, I can simply make new leads for it.

The right PSU depends on your needs and sometimes you really need the headroom and flexibility. Do I need a 750W PSU? No way! But it was only $30 more than the 550W and modular to boot, so why not? LOL.

It was also a bottom mounted PSU case (Antec 1200) so I had a limited selection of PSU's that would fit in that spot.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Anonymous Coward]

As true as everything you say is, it doesn't matter if you don't even bother providing links or ways to get to sources for the information you've helpfully provided.

References matter!

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[x2A]

Pinning it to a single core's not necessary at all, just running it as a single thread's sufficient, as a single thread will only ever be executing at most in one place at a time, much of the locking issues, race conditions etc, disappears as your code's all going to run strictly in order. You will still lose speed if you have to use any thread-safe libraries though, as they will have the proper locking code which will still get executed even in a non-threaded context, but most locking primatives are good enough that overhead in non-contended cases if minimal. Of course, if you have non-thread-safe versions of the libraries to use, then you get that speed back.

(In fact pinning it makes no difference at all, even on a single core, multithreaded apps still need proper locking as you never know when the OS is going to stop your execution and pass it over to another thread)

Done correctly the effects should be negligable anyway so this is all pretty much academic. The newer cores will tend to be faster than the older cores even at the same clockspeed (there've been a few exceptions in the past during the hertz-war, but thankfully we're past that now!) :-)

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[evol262]

You are conflating cache contention in early dual-core CPUs (Pentium Ds in particular) with thread-safe code being inherently slow. The speed loss from locking is two instructions, generally, and a library being "thread-safe" isn't going to murder performance.

I don't think you understand what locking is for if you worry about the OS's thread/process scheduler makes a damn bit of difference with regards to the need for locking. I repeat, locking is not why you were seeing crappy performance on multithreaded applications. Realistically, things have been multithreaded for a long time in STA containers, pthreads, and a million other implementations, because it's almost impossible to properly implement asynchronous calls or event handlers in single-threaded code.

Honestly, the newer cores were always faster than older cores "even at the same clockspeed" (especially at the same clockspeed), with the notable exception of Netburst's super-long pipeline.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[BikeHelmet]

Antec makes GOOD power supplies; not GREAT power supplies.

For a long time, their PSUs had weak +3.3/+5.0v rails, which caused a lot of stability problems with some boards. If the board or components draw too much, the PSUs can blow, even when there's plenty of +12v power to spare.

I had an Antec NEO HE 550 take a board with it. Now I stick to reliably good brands, like Seasonic(High efficiency), Corsair(rebranded Seasonic), Silverstone, PC P&C and Sparkle(for cheap PSUs); Sparkle makes about the best $40 PSU money can buy... but last time I checked they didn't make anything over 400 watts. When going for a Gaming PC, I always go with one of the other brands. Usually Corsair/Seasonic, because PC P&C makes noisy PSUs, and Silverstone is damn expensive. (though very stable according to oscilloscopes)

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[DirtyCanuck]

I say, build a second computer WITHIN the first computer. Water cool it and buy 2 120hz monitors and some 3d glasses. ;)

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[x2A]

*So* far wrong. The speed from locking is not 'two instructions', the closest would be instruction level locking for atomic updates where the bus lock is raised while the instruction executes, but that's not really the level of locking we're talking about here, although that will be used inside the locking primatives at the assembly code level.
Spinning mutual exclusion locks require more instructions, including at least one comparison and conditional jump, which in all contended cases or when branch prediction gets it wrong means at least one pipeline flush. If you hit a lock that's unlikely to be released in the very near future (which is always the case on single core - the lock can't be freed while you've got the processor) you have to yield the processor to give whatever's got the lock chance to finish using and release it... this means context switches which are expensive. Futex's (fast userspace mutual exclusions) are fast (as the name implies) and don't require a context switch in uncontended cases, but contended cases an be more expensive.

But all this is by the by anyway; designed well, with the correct locking algorithms used in each place rather than devestating locks such as the BKL, locking doesn't have to be expensive at all - or even necessary in cases where lockless algorithms can be used (such as by using per-core variables, RCU and the like), but locking conflicts *do* come up. NASA sent stuff up to Mars which crashed when it got there - it took much debugging to find it was being caused by priority inversion and they had to implement priority inheritance to stop it from happening. Linus eventually conceeded to allow some priority inheritance into the Linux kernel to stop its effects happening there once the "people should write proper code that won't suffer priority inversion" argument was viewed to be a futile one. This wouldn't happen if locking doesn't go wrong, or if locking problems were the CPU's fault and had to wait for newer processors to resolve.

Are you getting that I'm not making stuff up yet? The stuff going on beneith the hood of modern day operating systems is *chaos*. Slight timing issues for example due to a slower harddrive on one machine can cause a cascading effect of stalled locks through the system resulting in deadlock and livelock situations. Mine cropped up in [a much earlier version of] MySQL (although this doesn't necessarily mean it was mysql that was at fault). Telling it to run with only a single thread cured the problem. Newer versions are now running fine with a thread per core, on the same hardware.

Finally,

"Honestly, the newer cores were always faster than older cores "even at the same clockspeed""

Not in all cases! Please, resist using terms like "is always", you should be open to the fact that there could be knowledge outside of your own. Much code slowed down going from P5 to P6 as CISC to RISC instruction emulation was expensive. This mainly affected 16bit code IIRC (which there was a lot more of around at that time). There've also been cases where a newer architecture has been slower, but the changes have allowed them to push the core speed much higher than the previous architecture, so ultimately the speed will improve. I couldn't tell you exactly which ones as it's stuff I remember coming across and don't have time to dig through processor history of the past 5-10 years to find them (I've spent way too long on this already!), but I hope you can see that I'm not confused and my statements are well founded rather than baseless. I'm not in the habit of just making stuff up.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[ShigureBerry]

The easy way to judge quality when choosing a PSU is by weight. Heavy PSUs are quality PSUs and will last longer. Tip to PSU manufacturers: place bricks in low quality PSUs.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[ModernGeek]

Amen.

After trying to use a computer power supply for a recent project, I've found that if you really look into it, a "500W" power supply will put out about 100Watts on the 12V end, about 50Watts on the 5V end, and almost nothing on the 3.3V.

The project needed 12V at 15A max, so I assumed that a normal 500 Watt would be fine, but the second I started to pull a load, the tiny inductors would drain off within 2-20 seconds. All depending on how long the power supply was on for, and the safety mechanisms would shut down the PSU.

I noticed that nothing actually claimed that the power supply was a 500Watt power supply, they just put "500W" on the box, making you assume it meant that it could carry a load of 500 Watts. After carefully looking around, I noticed that all power supplies, even the old 200Watt models had almost all the same components, the only difference being a higher gauge steel box, or large heatsinks inside of the unit to make it heaver and "feel" more quality.

I finally used a power supply out of a Compaq ProLiant 5000R that could handle the load without any sort of issues, and quickly found that there is little to no difference in the quality of a $20 ATX power supply, or a $200 one.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[paganizer]

I've been in the computer business for a loooooong time; the only time I've ever had a Power Supply take out anything in it's death throws was a Prism midrange system, which for about 10 minutes looked like it was possessed, arc lightning everywhere. Actually thought we were going to have to hit the Halon for minute or 2.
As to PC's, I've had them catch fire and not hurt anything. Stability problems sure.. in fact on a 6000+ PC WAN environment that was one of the stats I kept track of to give an indication of imminent (eminent? my son graduated HS tonight, I'm wiped) failure, but I've never seen one hurt anything, no matter the pricepoint. I have heard of it happening, but I've also heard of people running into Elvis at a carwash in Nashville.
Obviously if I was putting together a 101% uptime 911 sever i would invest in a top of the line PSU, but for a gaming PC? nah.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[noundi]

I'll be damned.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[DarthVain]

Yup... Branding basically makes them expensive.

This was a couple of years ago, but I remember that one of the better models out there were called Fontron Source, or Sparkle Power. These are not brand names but rather the folks that make the stuff in China I believe. Notice the silly names, these are generic as generic gets. Yet the 400W and 450W versions of these would beat the pants off anything that cost less than 100$. Of course you could buy the brand name version as well, it just cost more, and some company like Antec or whatever would slap a sticker on the side.

The one I selected for my last build was a 500W, but not because I needed or wanted 500W, but because it got such good reviews as a quality PSU.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Andy Dodd]

Or go to Newegg and build up a new system.

A very good gaming system (Core 2 Duo, 9800GT) can be built for $500. An excellent system (Core 2 Quad, GTS 250) can be built for $600.

You'll probably spend $100-200 at least trying to get an existing system "up to snuff" for trying to do what the article poster wants to do, and the experience from that setup will be far less satisfying/more frustrating than just buying another system.

Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box.

[Andy Dodd]

1) Many power supply designs don't like it when the power demand is "unbalanced" - Pulling from only one rail and leaving the others unloaded can do some WEIRD things. Higher end power supplies have fully independent rails, but many have regulation on a given rail being dependent on other rails having a reasonable load.

2) Actually, the more current you're drawing, the smaller the inductor needs to be in order to have current flowing through it at all times (Counterintuitive but true) - This is why a power supply that is too lightly loaded will fall out of regulation. Of course, the switching transistors need to be bigger (main cost driver in power supplies) and the filter capacitors need to be bigger (second big cost driver and often #1 reliability driver).

Huh?

[DavidChristopher]

Sounds like you're complicating things a bit.

What you're not saying here is if you want to run multiple instances of the game at the same time. What kind of PC are you using now? It had better have a LOT of horsepower. 9/10 times, the simpler solution (a second gaming PC) is the smarter answer.

Keep in mind, Windows was not designed as a 'time sharing' system - at least not in the way you're thinking.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the dawn of multi-core processors (especially quad cores) I'm not sure that is going to be so much of an issue as it might seem.

Re:Huh?

[mzs]

Here is a specific example. Lots of games will not if there is another program running using Direct3D. Then there are those that will, but not full screen. Then there are some programs that do not have great options menus and only let you use the default sound device. Every now and then the program will then switch when it reinitializes the sound (after missions, when you select a new load, etc). I imaging the person asking the original question wanted two keyboards, two mice, two sound cards, two monitors, and one computer where on one screen would be one game running full screen and the sound going to a pair of headphones and then on another screen a game running full screen with sound to another set of head phones. It's just not something expected and is really not going to work right in practice.

Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[mr_stinky_britches]

It would seem as though he did not perform a google search prior to writing in?

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[Anonymous Coward]

search?q=2+players+1+computer

Woah! You almost had me fooled and made me click on that link!

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[mr_stinky_britches]

search?q=2+players+1+computer

Woah! You almost had me fooled and made me click on that link!

hah nice one anon...freud at work i s'pose.

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[mobets]

Or maybe he tried that and was disappointed by the lack of workable solutions.

There used to be a piece of hardware that would do this. Unfortunately I don't remember who made it, what it was called, or how it connected (probably USB). It had a pair of ps/2 ports and a monitor connection.

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[mobets]

Found it.
I was remembering a dongle, but this seems to fit functionality. Does CoH run on Win98?

http://www.dansdata.com/easyclone.htm

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[Evil Shabazz]

Ugh.. you know the editors are scrambling for anything when something like this makes the headlines... Why not just put up that feel-good piece about the kittens at the local bakery?

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would seem you didn't bother to check the search results. They mostly talk about 2 player games and a couple people asking what is being asked here without any resolution.

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[sumdumass]

There used to be one called PC buddy or something like that too. I test drove is back in the late 90's and when in use, it made both consoles about one quarter the speed of the original single CPU while it also defaulted to some simulated software graphic accelerator and ignores any hardware capabilities on the video card.

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[finity]

It's a trap!

For everybody taking this seriously, this is a joke about an Internet meme.

http://xkcd.com/467/

Re:Oh dear...did he even search the internets?

[Anonymous Coward]

s/players/girls/; s/computer/cup/

Virtual Machine?

[Vozmozno]

Although you'd probably need a monstrous rig to handle two games... maybe.

I'm really just guessing here. Maybe someone can tell me if that can be done =)

Re:Virtual Machine?

[DMalic]

Virtual machines don't support hardware accelerated gaming. That said, most games (read: everything except Crysis) have very low requirements. MMOs are a step down below that.. the $70 2.5 ghz Wolfdales are overkill for this.

Re:Virtual Machine?

[Yaztromo]

Virtual machines don't support hardware accelerated gaming.

That's not true. In fact, DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 hardware support it's one of the advertised features of VMware Fusion. Indeed, Fusion can even provide exactly what the submitter is looking for (see the section "Two" Computers in One)

However, to actually do this I'd suggest a pretty beefy computer, like a Quad Core Mac Pro with at least 4GB of RAM, and that's going to set you back quite a bit. It would be very significantly cheaper to, as some others have pointed out, just buy two refurbished computers (I picked up a factory refurb Compaq late last year for $200 CAD that would be powerful enough for the submitters needs). Heck, you could buy 10 - 20 of them for what it would cost for the Mac Pro, and you could make a Beowulf cluster out of them for what the Mac Pro solution would cost (and I say that as a big fan of the Mac Pro itself -- it is simply major overkill for the submitters needs. Technical ability doesn't necessarily mean it's the best possible solution).

Yaz.

Re:Virtual Machine?

[iamacat]

Virtual machines don't support hardware accelerated gaming

I am sorry to hear Windows is lacking behind Mac in concurrent gaming area. Under MacOSX they generally do.

Re:Virtual Machine?

[DMalic]

Ah, but does that actually work at near-native (or at least reasonable) performance levels? I ask is because common knowledge used to be (until at least recently) "virtualization doesn't/won't do that."

Re:Virtual Machine?

[x2A]

*lol* it's funny because if mac's were that far ahead of windows machines for anything gaming he wouldn't need to run it on windows under vmware in the first place

I got it!

+1 funny :-)

Re:Virtual Machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

"... like a Quad Core ... with at least 4GB of RAM ..."

This is slashdot, not www.worldofspectrum.com.

4core and 4gb is not a highend system, not even if you live in your moms basement.

Sucks Doesn't It

[fat_mike]

This was discussed the other day and I have to smile at the fact that this is the best the Linux community can come up with. You are seriously going to run City of Heroes on top of Wine on top of this other thing just to get a post on Slashdot? 1. Calling bullshit on the fiance 2. If she's real, she's sleeping with someone else 3. Linux!

Re:Sucks Doesn't It

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot != Linux community.

Get a life.

Re:Sucks Doesn't It

[sumdumass]

I think maybe you should stop assuming things not said and injecting your own information into the submission. It will make you look a lot less ignorant. Here are a few hints.

First, Slashdot does not equal the Linux community and just because there is an open source and linux bias, it in no way means the best of the linux community is here.

Second, who said anything about Linux or wine in the first place? The submitter said his fiance has a net book not a linux boxen. Netbooks run windows XP and/or linux with a few that has been able to dual boot with some work. Seeing how he didn't mention Linux or wine at all, and that he considered running COH in the netbook but realized it was way under powered, we can safely assume it's running XP.

Third, calling bullshit on having a fiance when you can't even read and understand the post is pathetic. My 7 year old has better comprehension then you do. I can only assume that you have a learning disability so I will excuse this behavior and attempt to assist you in the future with understanding what is written in plain english in front of you.

Fourth and finally, if she is sleeping with someone else, what does it matter? They may walk that way or it could be completely your own imagination as the rest of your post was. It seems that you have a problem with women and Linux and have a problem of inferring your discomfort with either onto others. It's probably related to your learning disability that you demonstrate so proficiently so I will attempt to help you out a little. Now I want you to think about this before replying. "it's not of your concern whether she is sleeping with anyone including her fiance or not". It simple is non of your business unless one of them make it your business or you part of the business.

You know, replying to you reminds me of s time back in 1986 or so when we were standing in line at a "buzzards nest" music store to get tickets to either metallica or pantera which was sidelining a concert somewhere near by. All the sudden we hear this long dragged our scream of excitement "YEA,"- "TOAST". We looked around and there was one of those kids who wears a bicycle helmet when when reading and he evidently found something in his mom's pocket book that he was so proud to be helping carry as they were walking by us on their way to a K-mart. So I have to ask, do you wear a helmet when doing trivial tasks too?

Priorities, people, priorities!

[Anonymous Coward]

Letâ(TM)s see⦠where to start⦠How about...

(a) focus on more SEX
(b) if youâ(TM)re doing SEX right, you wonâ(TM)t want or be able to game at the same time
(c) let her game whenever she wants as long as the SEX is good

Re:Priorities, people, priorities!

[x2A]

What's wrong with your post, looks like you're stuggling with the keyboard... wrist playing up?

Hmmm

[scubamage]

Honestly, a 5 year old game could most likely run on the cheapest of cheap systems at best buy. Go spend the 2-300$ (yes, they have them that cheap) and fish around your local recycling center/craigslist for a monitor. When you're done with the phase, sell it on craigslist for a hundred bucks as a set, or keep it as a media pc. You're on a geek website bro, there's always a use for another PC. Always.

Re:Hmmm

[JayAEU]

In addition to buying a cheap system being the better solution, the software would cost around 200$ as well!

Re:Hmmm

[__aamnbm3774]

I don't recommend Best Buy for anything, but thats me.

Even a 300 dollar machine is a rip off there.

Re:Hmmm

[socrplayr813]

I'd have to say this is the most logical solution. If you need ideas of uses for the box if/when she's done with her phase, come back here and I'm sure people will help you with that.

I can't compare with some of the folks here for geekiness, but I turned one old computer (bought in 2001) into a nicely centralized file server. Greatest thing I've done in a long time. It's great for sharing media to the laptop especially... movies and music anywhere in the house without the hassle of transferring stuff around.

My current project is a box that I originally built in 2005. I'm (slowly) turning it into a MythTV box, which will save me the cost of Time Warner's digital cable and DVR fee. I can't wait until I have the time to finish that one up. I swear my bill gets bigger every month and I don't want to know where they're pulling these fees from.

DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

[__aaclcg7560]

You're asking a bunch of dorks about a technical question concerning the opposite sex?

head explodes

Re:DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

[iamhassi]

"You're asking a bunch of dorks about a technical question concerning the opposite sex? "

He's obviously lying.

He's 14 and his cousin's visiting for a few weeks and left his Alienware laptop charger in LA. Any adult geek of marrying age would have a few 2+ ghz PCs lying around that a cheap video card could be thrown in, or spend $100+ on Craigslist and buy a suitable PC.

Re:DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

[adolf]

Close.

It's actually his second cousin, and she's visiting him in Kentucky. That makes it all square.

(Hey, if you can't fuck your friends and family, then who can you fuck?)

Re:DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

[Autonom]

"(Hey, if you can't fuck your friends and family, then who can you fuck?)" (sic) "I gotta buy you, like, a proverb book or something. This mix'n'match shit's gotta go." Families that play together... Stay together. "Now make like a tree... and get the f*** out of here!"

Re:DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

[Kotoku]

Hmm, this is Slashdot!

I thought we were supposed to make jokes about how none of us can ever hope to have marital relations.

Guess the parent post got an angry codemonkey!

Re:DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

[Anonymous Coward]

You Mean There Is More Than One Sex!

Re:DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

[StikyPad]

Wrong again. The correct answer is: If you can't keep it in your pants, keep it in the family.

Multiseat

[Thalaric]

It's called multiseat. It's a feature that's targetted for the next version of Fedora Linux . I'm not sure if there's any way to do it under windows but vmware or virtualbox might help when Fedora 12 comes out.

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.

Re:Multiseat

[Korin43]

Depending on how hard this is to do in Windows, it may be worth just running two instances of CoH in Wine. It sounds like it's playable.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

Multi-seat Linux is next in line... Right behind Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Multiseat

[x2A]

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

I can. 2003 baby.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Sure you can, even on non-server versions of Windows - at least when it comes to XP. It does require small modifications to a dll file, but the instructions are easy to find. So it's not a technical limitation, just a feature intentionally disabled.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

waiting... what ? i've been using it on my OpenSuse box back in 2006 exactly with same reason as this guy.
i even managed to split my integrated hda sound chip into 2 virtual sound cards, which can be used simultaneously and separately.

come ooon, wake up, Neo, you lazy bastard

Re:Multiseat

[DamageLabs]

Try this http://www.kood.org/terminal-server-patch/

Works great on WinXP SP2 & SP3.

Patches the RDP server to accept more then one connection and does not kick of the console user. Been using it for several years so that I can run updates and fix client computers while they continue working. Since the patch reverts back a file from original WinXP (before service patches) I do believe it is completely legal.

Re:Multiseat

[speedtux]

I've been waiting for multiseat linux to gel for years.

Are you joking? Multiseat on Linux is used everywhere and has been around nearly from day 1.

People usually start it up via

ssh -X someserver.com

or

ssh -f -L 5910:localhost:5910 someserver.com tightvncserver :10
xtightvncviewer :10

Granted, there is no brain-dead mode for people who don't know how to use VNC or X, but, geez, it's one or two commands. You can run Gnome, KDE, or whatever else your heart desires.

Re:Multiseat

[ObscureCoder]

Why not just `startx -- :1` then configure keyboard and mouse for that session? It has worked for me in the past and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work now. No reason to wait for the next version when it already works.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you can. Server 2008 works GREAT as a gaming OS - search the web for setting up Server 2008 instead of Vista - you'll be surprised.

And you can Remote Desktop with 2 additional connections to the server in addition to being on the console. So if you have a beefy enough system try remote desktoping to the server and running your game - see how it does ;)

Re:Multiseat

[timeOday]

That's not what multiseat means. Ssh or vnc from a remote host requires having a remote host. Multiseat means 2 or more separate consoles (screen, mouse, keyboard) plugged into a single PC.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

... not with windows' remote desktop app, but there is software to keep the actual user on and have a remote user. My school system does it all the time to update teacher laptops. BUT I AM NOT PRAISING MY SCHOOLS TECH. WHO EVER DESIGNED OUR NETWORK IS A FLIPPING MORON. They run redundant VNC software, server level page blocking, and they host all of our sessions on the server. This all results in bandwidth bottle necking, especially first thing in the morning when everyone signs on.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Windows Terminal Server and Terminal Services.

I believe that what you meant to say is that you can't use Remote Desktop to connect to a Windows client OS without booting the other user and that is true.

Their Server line does not have this self-imposed limitation.

That being said it still isn't the solution the OP is looking for. The performance is no where near being able to handle 3D games over RDP.

YMMV.

Re:Multiseat

[RiotingPacifist]

Erm multiseat has been around and will always be around due to the xorg architecture. It has *always* been possible. There are basically 2 solutions:

*"the old way" setup xorg.conf with two xservers with seperate gfx card (it may be possible to do it on one gfx card but there will probably be driver/performance problems), keyboard & mouse. Additionally he can use a simple script to switch over xorg configurations and use the same setup as a dual monitor system. From a technical standpoint this is the way to go, 2 users, 2 accounts, 2 desktops.

*"the new way" much more complicated and im not entirely sure how it would work, but also much more powerful and dynamic, use mpx and strange keyboard binding to use both mice and both keyboards on a single xserver (preferably powered by two gfx cards anyway). This is the new shiny way to go, technically inferior but more userfriendly once setup.

Re:Multiseat

[timeOday]

Yeah, I know. What you call the "new way" is really the wrong way, but the reason people do it is because they can't get the two xserver instance method to work. You use something like Xephyr to run separate client/server xservers within a single larger xsession.

The two xserver method is the right way, but varies from a pain in the neck to impossible from release to release of kernel (console code), X, and video card drivers. There are dozens of web pages with howtos that are all specific to particular distros and video cards. It's the kind of thing you can probably get working, the effort required (if successful at all) being somewhere between a couple hours and a couple weeks, and it's likely to break the next time you sync or update your kernel, X, or video drivers.

Re:Multiseat

[timeOday]

By the way the reason I call the "new way" the wrong way is because as far as I know, accelerated video will never work. Nor will monitor power management. And from my experience with xserver-within-xservers (including Xephyr, VNC, and VMWare), they all have keyboard driver bugs where the client or server will start typing only in caps, or control keys stop working, etc, etc.

Again, it's all stuff that exists. The reason I say it hasn't "gelled" is because there doesn't seem to be critical mass of users to make it work correctly, much less conveniently.

Re:Multiseat

[pigeon768]

Yes, I run multiseat X on my computer at home. There's one video card+dual monitor+keyboard+mouse going to the desktop, and there's a second video card+TV (accepts DVI in)+keyboard+mouse going to my couch. Works great. I can play games on the desktop, including CoH/CoV in cedega, while a second person can sit on the couch and play games there.

We never did exactly what the article poster is asking for - play CoH at two seats simultaneously - but we did play WoW simultaneously on the couch and desk, and I did play CoH by myself on the desktop.

Caveats: You need two video cards. Nvidia cards work great. I can't speak for ATI cards.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Not true, if you use Windows Server you can easily install multiple remote desktop client access licenses which will allow the access you speak of. Now gaming over RDP, I don't know if that's a feasible option.

Re:Multiseat

[TopherC]

I was reading this thread because I have a Gentoo box for stuff like web serving and mythtv, but would like the flexibility to let my kids play a Windows game on it now and then. These are slightly-obscure kids games that work poorly even under windows and are probably not worth the effort to get working under wine.

My question is whether or not I can run them on a virtual PC (xen, virtualbox, or kvm)? I get the impression that I can't since they inveriably use directX which isn't supported in a virtualized environment. But ... am I wrong about that? I hope so.

Re:Multiseat

[godrik]

It worked for years under debian for me. You just have to configure two serverlayout in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and give the right parameter to X to select the server layout at boot time. It has to be done manually and it would of course be nice to have a GUI to configure it properly.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Copying a single .dll from a server edition and changing a single registry setting will then allow even home editions 1 console + 9 RDP sessions.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install Windows Server 200x. When you create a remote desktop connection, it creates a new session, and even lets you resume it after you have closed. You can have as many people as you want (I am sure there is so limit?) connect to the server.

No need to by 3rd party software to run a thin client.

Re:Multiseat

[speedtux]

Ssh or vnc from a remote host requires having a remote host.

No, it just requires having some kind of terminal (X terminal usually).

If you want the other kind of multiseat, multiple graphics cards and keyboards in the same PC, Linux supports that as well, there just isn't a good UI for configuring it. That's because it's really an inferior setup and there is little reason to use it over X terminals. But if you really want to, it's not hard to use either.

Windows, on the other hand, doesn't support either setup well.

Re:Multiseat

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you missed the boat. Multiseat Linux (and other variants of UNIX) was around decades ago - primarily because network transparency and multi-screen support was a design feature of X11. X11 Terminals allow multiple users to remote-connect to a single X11 server.

Incidentally, this network transparency still applies today. Setup any SSH server on a Linux box to allow X11 forwarding, and run the following on a client machine:
ssh -X -Y

You should get an application appear on your client machine that is actually running on the server. (Technically speaking, your client's X11 server is displaying an X11 client - the app.) The application can be anything from a text editor or calculator to a full desktop instance.

Actual multi-seat is only slightly less trivial. There's at least one documented case of one PC being used for six independently controlled heads - all it requires is sufficient video outputs, USB inputs (for keyboard/mouse etc) and some editing of your Xorg.conf.

You want to play the game *with* her, right?

[zippthorne]

Just get the cheapest inspiron from dell and dump the integrated graphics for...anything that's not integrated. Then you won't have to worry about virtual machines with direct graphics access or any other time sucking rough spots.

Also, if you can wait a few weeks, keep checking the best buy circular for the coupon code for the extra-discounted cheap dell machine.

Re:You want to play the game *with* her, right?

[PitaBred]

Wait a few weeks? Hell, it's Memorial Day Weekend. Go buy a machine this weekend... it's as cheap as it'll get for a long time.

Solution

[Bazouel]

Buy a console. Or play other kind of "games" with her ;) Or go out. I mean anything where you actually spend time interacting with each other in the real world.

Re:Solution

[sys.stdout.write]

Can we collectively as a community agree to stop answering these with things like "here's a solution: don't do what you're trying to do"?

If you don't know the answer that's fine, but don't cloak it by telling people to go outside. If I wanted to go outside I wouldn't read Slashdot!

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask Slashdot, Get Slashdot

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.

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Slash dot dash dot slash dot dash dot slash dot dash dot com

Re:Solution

[syousef]

Can we collectively as a community agree to stop answering these with things like "here's a solution: don't do what you're trying to do"?

Just as soon as people stop asking stupid questions that amount to "I can't be bothered googling, but...", or "I'm too cheap to do it the right way. Got any other suggestions?" or "I just bit off way more than I can chew at work but I expect a post on slashdot to overcome years lacking in knowledge and experience".

In other words, no we can't collectively agree. Hell, we can't even collectively agree on the colour of the sky on a bright sunny day. Slashdot is a diverse place, and some of us have more social skills and subtlety than others. So could YOU please stop asking questions you know won't change a thing?

Re:Solution

[Eskarel]

We can collectively stop answering these things with "don't" when people stop asking questions where it is the most appropriate response.

The answer to this question is definitely "don't".

There are ways to do it, but pretty much all of them involve far more money and/or time than just buying a reasonable PC for his fiancee. Hardware isn't all that expensive and solving a problem like this isn't easy, cheap, or particularly effective.

Slashdot gets a lot of these sorts of questions because for things where the answer is "don't" you generally don't find a lot of useful information from a google search and so people ask here instead. We tell them, don't, which is the best advice they can get.

Re:Solution

[x2A]

Yeah good luck with that... for that, slashdot would need to be filled with ya know like... positively minded people? Or even the people here now once they've discovered other ways to make themselves feel good that isn't related to going "your idea's crapper than my caustic nature" in the most unconvincing ways.

I click the story cuz I was interested in what people had to say... I'm not interested in doing it myself, I have no need to, so I'm not gonna google it, but I can still be interested in solutions people have to offer (which has been extremely poor on this thread, but a few good bits of information).

But oh my god the whining and bitching, HINT SLASHDOTTERS :: If the story bores you, DON'T CLICK IT!!!! Go get a big brush and clean the sand out of your vaginas or something.

(and yes I am aware of the subtle ironies of my post :-)

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bash.org/?866112

Re:Solution

[halltk1983]

Hell, we can't even collectively agree on the colour of the sky on a bright sunny day.

Clear. The sky is clear.

Re:Solution

[sorak]

It may be appropriate to suggest an alternate way of reaching the poster's goal, but GP was referring to a post that basically said "stop playing video games and bang your wife already".

You see how the first answer is a valid solution to the problem, while my two year old son tells me that the second answer just leads to more problems.

Build another pc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just heap together some old parts - a base machine should come out to be 250 - 300 if you play your cards right ( dual core athlon, 9600GT or some other cheap graphics card, a basic hd, basic case + psu combo eg. centurion 5 with psu, some cheap ddr2 ram and a 780g mobo ). or a cheap dell with an added card.

The graphics might not be able to be shared in that manner for a fairly modern game.

Not to mention that if its connected over a lan, chances are the game play is going to suck.

You could try running two instances of the game as separate users on your machine (and hook up two monitors) and use synergy to do movements or something.

wow people do multiboxing to run multiple instances, which you can look into but the thing will probably suck with a game that actually needs something kinda new.

Parentheses!

[Veggiesama]

Parentheses, man! Learn to use them (or if you don't want to learn how to use them, just avoid using them (unless you are just trying to be hopelessly recursive (which is not always a bad thing))).

Re:Parentheses!

[MostAwesomeDude]

I'm sorry, but I had to point this out.

Periods go inside parentheses, just like quotation marks (or just about any other sentence-ending punctuation, really.)

Re:Parentheses!

[AliasMarlowe]

Periods go inside parentheses, just like quotation marks (or just about any other sentence-ending punctuation, really.)

Not always. It's actually a trickier issue with some sentences. For instance, which of the following is correct:
In early documents, Ms Rice's first name was spelled Condoleeeza [sic].
In early documents, Ms Rice's first name was spelled Condoleeeza [sic.]
Ah, you may exclaim, that example used square brackets, not parentheses, and "sic." often has a period as it is a contraction of "sicut". But what if the entire sentence were parenthetical:
Ms Condoleeza Rice (earlier, her first name was spelled Condoleeeza [sic]).
Ms Condoleeza Rice (earlier, her first name was spelled Condoleeeza [sic].)
Ms Condoleeza Rice (earlier, her first name was spelled Condoleeeza [sic.])
Similar questions arise for sentences ending with quotes inside parentheses and other forms of consecutive punctuation. One could construct a sentence which is a question, but which terminates in a parenthetical statement which is not a question, or is even an exclamation.

Winston Smith's committee, set up in 1984, has not yet issued a definitive recommendation on this vexed issue.

Re:Parentheses!

[x2A]

Classically yes, but... meh... it doesn't make sense, it's unstructured, it's not nearly as expressive, and so I for one plain don't like it. For example, take a question within a statement or question:

Did he just say "what's your name?"?

Yes, he did just say "what's your name?"!

It's far more logical that way; the ending punctuation applies to the current lexical block and expresses information about it. Without it, take this contrived example:

He said "I said that?"

Am I asking whether he told me that he did say it, or am I telling you that he asked me to confirm what he said.

No, I don't like it one bit... and it's not stupidity, ignorance or laziness, I actually think the other way is better.

Re:Parentheses!

[Aladrin]

Unless you live in England. This site -is- accessed internationally, you know.

Re:Parentheses!

[jonaskoelker]

Parentheses, man! Learn to use them (or if you don't want to learn how to use them, just avoid using them (or (unless you are just trying to be hopelessly recursive (which is not always a bad thing)) (unless (programs-p you 'lisp))).

(for 'Veggiesama (fix (parent this-post)))

Re:Parentheses!

[jonaskoelker]

Am I asking whether he told me that he did say it, or am I telling you that he asked me to confirm what he said.

Next you're going to teach us about the humorous effects of unintentional-looking irony, right!

Re:Parentheses!

[TheLink]

Yeah, I prefer the higher precision way. The "classical" way is silly.

Re:Parentheses!

[x2A]

Should that be a question mark at the end there? (*lol* sorry couldn't resist, plz don't pull out the WWII references!)

Re:Parentheses!

[Locke2005]

I take it that you're a Lisp programmer, then?

Re:Parentheses!

[x2A]

We should start a movement, a Structured English Society to spread awareness of gain followers of this improvement to the written language :-)

Re:Parentheses!

[michaewlewis]

Just cover all your bases and put a period everywhere.
Ms Condoleeza Rice (earlier, her first name was spelled Condoleeeza. [sic.].).

Re:Parentheses!

[ProfessionalCookie]

Ha! Maybe you're writing for the tards at the MLA- I think the rest of us can agree that it's syntactic suicide (just like quotation marks).

Why ?

[dezent]

Yes i can see why you want this, but i can not understand why or how you managed to get the question posted on /. instead of just getting a second computer.

Multiseat is your solution

[Jeremy Visser]

It can't be done with Windows (at least not to my knowledge), but multiseat on Linux these days is a cinch. Google has tons of resources on the topic -- basically it involves a bit of xorg.conf hacking, and then Bob's your uncle.

I myself have done it before on an amd64 dual-core 2.2GHz system with two video cards, a GeForce 7600GT on PCI-e, and a GeForce 6200 on plain PCI. Worked beautifully. I could multiplayer FlightGear by running one instance on each seat. Each user can log on and off independently with their own keyboard and mouse.

This is a (blurry and fuzzy) picture of my setup (1280x1024 JPG). You can see glxgears running on each screen -- handled by the same computer. Cool thing about using two video cards is that each user gets his own GPU -- running two FPSes simultaneously (I tested Nexuiz) had absolutely zero slowdown.

Re:Multiseat is your solution

[Anonymous Coward]

There are multiple SW solutions to do just that on Windows. This, for example.

Whether or not the machine in question would be able to run both games is another matter, of course.

Re:Multiseat is your solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, wrong link (Userful is a Linux solution...)

Here.

Or Here.

Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried that. Tt didn't work for me. I needed a fast internet connection, and two fast computers, which defeats the whole purpose, and, despite what you may think, having two games going on at the same time often presented "resource in use" type problems and slowed down the target PC). The ideal solution would be to isolate each application somehow (VMWare ThinApp?), or get a way to run both simutaneously, and connect two mice, keyboards, and monitors to the computer, which Windows is not capable, and Linux will only be in 6 months with xinput2.

But, out of the two, Remote Desktop would be your best bet. If you can get two instances running and decent FPS (with a netbook?), please, let me know. If only the netbook could be used as the second "computer"...

Re:Uh...

[Arker]

connect two mice, keyboards, and monitors to the computer, which Windows is not capable, and Linux will only be in 6 months with xinput2.

Umm what?

Linux could handle this just fine in 1994, so I think you are confused. Either that or basic functionality has been torn out between now and then, which doesnt seem very likely.

Obviously fake.

[Shag]

Gamer with a fiancee? I can't believe you guys fell for this obvious troll attempt.

Re:Obviously fake.

[hyades1]

If I had any moderator points right now, you'd definitely be getting one.

Re:Obviously fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamer who knows a girl that will talk to him? Even harder to beleive.

Re:Obviously fake.

[Khyber]

I don't know whether to mod you funny or let my gamer fiance, who's sitting next to me, slap you over the internet.

We both game. He's playing GalCiv2 and I'm posting on /. and waiting for my Titan Expansion to finish downloading for UT3.

Re:Obviously fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

lies!

Re:Obviously fake.

[hubert.lepicki]

Eek. My girlfriend is a ioquake3 player and she is damn hot chick. Nothing strange about it these days. Not a troll attempt IMHO.

Re:Obviously fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether to mod you funny or let my gamer fiance, who's sitting next to me, slap you over the internet.

We both game. He's playing GalCiv2 and I'm posting on /. and waiting for my Titan Expansion to finish downloading for UT3.

Well, obviously homosexuals don't count. Not that difficult to find men who are into gaming...

Re:Obviously fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

You said he which indicates that you are the female in the relationship. This proves that you do not exist.

Re:Obviously fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

And for the facts to back it up
Here is his MySpace
Here is his Photobucket
Here is his fiance's MySpace

And the way he talks about HIV, medical use of marijuana, and even Leisure Suit Larry all point to characteristics of a male profile.


Not that there is anything really wrong with homosexuality or bisexuality (I once had a brother-in-law who was a gay, wolf furry), but he tried to ruin the GGP's joke on association of gamers with fiancees by deferring from the standard stereotypes of male-female relationships to interject his own relationship status - which completely goes under the joke as finding a male partner interested in video games is much, much more likely than finding a female companion with the same enthusiasm.

Re:Obviously fake.

[jaraxle]

Yeah, I know that was posted to be funny, but...

My wife and I recently dropped $3,200 Canadian on a pair of new 3.2GHz Core2Duo, 4GB 1066 RAM computers specifically for gaming together. Not only do we have that, but we also each have our own XBox 360's; hers upstairs in the living room and mine in the basement den.

While we do enjoy going out sometimes, we're mostly homebodies. We have 3 kids so not only do we have to deal with the price of whatever we do when we go out, but we also have to pay babysitting fees, so we just use at-home entertainment (which I've come to find is far better than, say, paying exorbitant prices to see a movie in the theatre, or go out for dinner when I'm a pretty fine cook imo). We justify the cost of our systems with the savings of not going out all the time.

It's also fun when one of us goes "afk" in a raid to... erm... titillate the other. :)

~jaraxle

Re:Obviously fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

It Sounds like you need to drop that can of beer and find yourself a compatible mate.

My wife and I have been playing WOW for over 4 years. We also play Eve-Online but not as often. She is looking forward to Stargate Worlds if it ever comes out. Just because you can't find someone with like interests doesn't mean they don't exist. It's more likely you are just looking in the wrong places or for the wrong qualifications.

I do agree with most of the posts. For 3D gaming, you are probably better off setting up a 2nd machine. Use it as an excuse to upgrade yours and build a computer with the spare parts. It's a cheap upgrade process that has allowed me to build computers for my wife and kids.

tomshardware has a monthly article on what to build for the money. it's a great resource.

Re:Obviously fake.

[T.E.D.]

You obviously meant this for a funny mod, and got your reward.

However, this really isn't all that odd at all. My wife plays MMORPGs with me. In fact, it was our only way to get some time out having fun together back in the days when the kids were young and we couldn't leave them alone to physically go out together.

This is far from uncommon. Most of my Warcraft guild was couples, and there were more than a few single women (in the guild sans boyfriend) as well. On the roleplaying servers, I wouldn't be shocked if I were told most players were female.

This isn't the 1990's anymore folks. Enjoy it.

Re:Obviously fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

GalCiv? Is that like Civ for girls?

Re:Obviously fake.

[Khyber]

Umm, you're a moron. The second myspace belongs to my half-brother.

You must be the same asshole who's trying to impersonate me on twitter. Don't worry, we have a False Impersonation charge for your ass soon enough.

Re:Obviously fake.

[Khyber]

Who said I was female? In fact most everyone here knows I'm gay.
You must be new here. Go get your 8-digit UID now.

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.

Might work

[Anonymous Coward]

I have done this for business not gaming might work.

http://www2.userful.com/products/downloads/free-2-user

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.

[averner]

What kind of "small netbook" could play Far Cry back when Radeon 1950s were good?? My 2 year old laptop with discrete graphics hardly handles Doom 3 (~30 fps at minimum res and low settings), and Far Cry is supposed to have similar system reqs..

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

[sys.stdout.write]

Is marriage really this antagonistic?

... I ask as a wide-eyed youngin.

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

[GrpA]

A Fujitsu P1510 with Intel 915 GMS chipset.

I had to run a hardware emulator to support later DirectX video modes (for dynamic shading etc.) but it was playable without significant frame loss on an external monitor at 1280x1024.

I also played Tron2.0 on it at the same resolution and it was quite smooth.

Showing people both tended to impress them.

The P1510 still beats most modern netbooks and it's 3 years old now. Well ahead of it's time, although did cost a bit of a premium... But the tablet mode is nice :)

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Often a fight.
I think I'd kill myself if I were in your position.

The sex better be good, otherwise....

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

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're marrying just for sex I think you'd be better off with hookers.

If you were planning on having children. Then either donate sperm/eggs, or marry. Statistics show that having both parents around is better for the children.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Quad-core P4? No such thing.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

...and this is why my wife and I have kept our money (outside base bills and savings) separated. She has no problem with my hardware because she has no idea of the costs.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is the assumption of it being "a passing phase". That phrasing sounds pretty chauvinistic to me.

I won't be surprised if her interest in him dwindles before her interest in the game does...

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

[ShakaUVM]

>>Therefore, buying something new (a mouse, a motherboard, a DVD burner, another terabyte of disk or few gigs of RAM) is often a fight.

Separate accounts, man. Separate accounts.

My wife buys things I consider to be kind of silly, she doesn't understand the difference between a NVIDIA RIVA TNT and a NVIDIA 285 GTX, but since we both work and keep separate accounts for everything except food, rent, and the vacation fund, we're both quite happy.

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

[adolf]

No, no. It's not a fight for me -- remember, I'm the exceptional case I wrote about. It's just a fight for some married folks I happen to know.

I have no problem buying reasonable amounts of hardware on a whim...or reasonable amounts of tequila or bourbon, for that matter, either. Others' wives aren't always so tolerant.

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

[adolf]

Right. Because the best way to live happily ever after is to have as many secrets as possible.

Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[TiggertheMad]

It had better have a LOT of horsepower.

Meh, it isn't that difficult. I had a friend get into 5 boxing on WoW. He got a beefy system a couple of years ago, and could run 4 or 5 instances of WoW simultaneously without any real problem.

Two things to think about:

Does the game you want to play with her allow multiple instances to be run on a single computer? WoW does, but you have to have multiple WoW directories. It is possible to program a game to force full screen mode or to terminate if an existing instance is already running. Do some research on the software before buying the hardware. Find out about any tricks you need to use to get it to work.

Find out about the game controls and UI. Chances are, while it might be possible to play multiple instances on one box, it might be a PITA because of the complexity of the game to share a mouse/keyboard. Multi-boxing works in WoW because one person drives multiple characters. Two people using a single keyboard and mouse would not work very well for that game. Other games might be different.

Search google for 'Multi-boxing' + '(your game name)'. Chances are someone has already tried what you are wanting to do.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the game you want to play with her allow multiple instances to be run on a single computer? WoW does, but you have to have multiple WoW directories.

WoW runs perfectly fine with only a single directory... or at least it did for me.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[DerekLyons]

CoX does allow you to run multiples instances, but you are going to need some hefty iron to do it.

Even better than googling would be to drop by official forums, people are pretty helpful in matters like this.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[slyn]

This is correct, I don't know what the process is on a windows computer, but setting up multiple instances of WoW in a single directory on a Mac is as simple as:

1. going into the WoW application folder
2. selecting the game icon (not the launcher)
3. hitting cmd+d or right clicking and selecting "duplicate"

Doing so will make a copy of the app with a new name ("world of warcraft" becomes "world of warcraft copy" etc) that uses the same directory.

Then you just download Clonekeys, which is mindbogglingly easy to set up, get your /follow macros set up, and your ready to multi box as many instances as your computer can handle.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Gerzel]

Most DO but sometimes you have to put a line into the preferences manually.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Multiboxing wow does not require multiple WoW directories. You can simply launch the game twice, even from the same icon, and two instances of WoW will open. I recommend windowing the game though.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW does, but you have to have multiple WoW directories.

you don't need multiple wow directories to run multiple instances. it can happily run multiple instances from a single wow installation without a problem.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can and do run City of Heroes/Villains with two instances at once. I use windowed mode from the graphics selection in the game itself, but only one keyboard/mouse as I am just one person. Starting the second client is a bit tricky but once you have it down it's no problem at all. Start the preloader, wait for it to check for patch, click next, then I accept. Once it's cleared, start the preloader, next, accept-before the first one finishes loading. You can have two instances, but not two preloaders. I play mostly from 6:30 to 9 eastern @aloenia Virtue server

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Sandbags]

Yea, this guy's right. Even if you could run CoH in multiple instances concurrently (which shouldn't be hard, it's not THAT resource intensive for an MMO, though it uses a bit more than WoW to look good), you can't easily make Windows understand how to use 2 sets of keyboards and mice concurrently.

Sure, the keyboard you could likely get past by having 2 and using completely different keys for each instance, but especially in CoH, the 1-8 keys, control key, and space bar are REALLY important... The mouse however is the real issue. Connect multiple mice and you do not get mutliple cursors. Windows was not designed for multiple concurrent user access. (virtually no OS is except via command shell).

Even if it could be done, you're likely talking about adding a much more powerful GPU to your machine, a bunch of RAM, and likey you might also need to considder a ram disk to keep load lag to a minimum (CoH is texture heavy). The cost to upgrade your machine likely exceeds the cost of a cheap gaming rig.

My wife's 3.5 year old gateway notebook (AMD64, 1GB, ATI x600) Ran COH pretty well... she played it for years, and had spare resources to run custom background utilities and a voice chat app. She ran the game on basically medium requirements. A $300 el-cheapo PC combo from BestBuy (there are FEW that have PCIe slots, but MAKE SURE YOU CHECK!) and a $79 graphics car will bet the pants off her laptop config, likely for less than upgrading your rig to pull it off...

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Angeliqe]

I just ran 2 copies of the launcher on Widows Vista. Works just fine with one directory. Now if you wanted 2 different UI's or game option setups, it might be different. I haven't tried. I know in EverQuest, it was possible to have 2 different UI's, and game options only had the effect of the last one to log out would save the options for the next instance you logged in.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[HydrusZ]

The second WoW instance will be using a different account than the first, which will have its own configuration, loaded mods, macros, etc. There's no extra setup required on Windows. Just run the same exe twice and you'll have two separate instances running for your two accounts, using the same install and mods folders.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

COH is honestly more demanding than WOW. Memory usage is about the same, but the video isn't as well optimized.

As far as needing multiple directories to run multiple copies of WOW, that is false. You can run as many copies as you want to your hearts content out of the same directory.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

wow does not require more than one install to run multiple instances of the game. I run three instances off my desktop, and have just one installation.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Ifandbut]

MOD UP MORE!!!!

I sometimes triple-box when power leveling alts with a friend's account. I just double clicked on the desktop short cut to open up another instance.

I even had all graphical settings maxed and the only time I run into lag is when one character is in Dalaran.

Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what kind of graphics requirements CoH has, but I play World of Warcraft on my Netbook. Granted I have all the settings turned down, but it is quite playable.

Use her netbook

[virtualXTC]

Have her use remote desktop (rdc / rdp ) to gain a second session on your box.

Re:Use her netbook

[vux984]

Have her use remote desktop (rdc / rdp ) to gain a second session on your box.

XP Home doesn't support it.
XP Pro will boot off the console user when a remote user logs in.
Vista is the same set of rules, afaik.

You need windows Server to active support multiple simultaneous interactive sessions.

And that STILL won't let you run a 3d accelerate game 'remotely'.

For the application at hand, it would be simpler to just buy a $300 budget gaming PC and be done with it.

Re:Use her netbook

[x2A]

"For the application at hand, it would be simpler to just buy a $300 budget gaming PC and be done with it."

Have you met any getting-married people? They spend nothing on anything that isn't "saving up for the wedding" ... unless it's like one of those google "beta" "engagements" of course.

Re:Use her netbook

[Anonymous Coward]

You need windows Server to active support multiple simultaneous interactive sessions.

You don't really, you can make it work on non-server versions of Windows. It does require small modifications to a dll file, but the instructions are easy to find. It's just a feature intentionally disabled. Well worth the trouble to make it work considering how useful it can be.

And that STILL won't let you run a 3d accelerate game 'remotely'.

This, however, is unfortunately true.

Re:Use her netbook

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get one of those hacked RDP dll.

http://deepxw.blogspot.com/2009/04/universal-termsrvdll-patch.html

Use a rental

[Mr_Tulip]

If this is only a short term thing, why not rent a shiny new laptop for a few months. Not only will you be able to show it off at cafe's, but it will also be a tax-deductible expense.

As a bonus, I guess your 'partner' could use it to 'play games' while in bed.

Still not going to work...

[Fallen Kell]

Well, aside from the fact that the software you pointed to requires a second video card, which for gaming, should be the most expensive part of the computer, you will also have the issue of game license issues due to only having one computer, running 2 instances of the same game at the same time will be very difficult if not impossible for many games. Most will check to see if multiple license keys are in use at the same time with online play, and to my knowledge, installing 2 copies of the same game on the same computer using different keys is not something that will work either since that is a use that was never designed into the games and they will usually check to se if it is already installed and basically say that it is already installed on the computer. And for most MMORPGs you are not allowed to connect two sessions/characters online at the same time, so that will be something you need to look at as well.

It is probably just better to build a cheap game rig. Simply do a budget gaming PC:
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 Wolfdale ~$70
Asus P5QL Motherboard ~$90
4GB DDR2 RAM ~$20
320GB hard drive ~$45
DVD+/-RW ~$25
SIGMA La Vie LBYWBP computer case with 500W power supply ~45 after rebate
ATI HD4770 video card ~$100
Total: ~$395

If you need an extra copy of XP or Vista, well that will be another ~$100, and if you need a monitor, another $100-150.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Anonymous Coward]

To explain what BeTwin does, it hooks into Terminal Services and drivers, and redirects devices to each terminal.

So, you don't need an extra copy of Windows. They somehow reimplemented terminal services to get around licensing problems (as you can see with their other product). Not sure how that works.

BeTwin only requires you get the video card and USB hub + peripherals. Which is far cheaper than what you have posted.
Cheap Video Card $40
You can get these USB hubs with integrated audio, for around $20 USD in China.

The only problem, is that BeTwin itself is really expensive. You can buy BeTwin clones in China for next to nothing.
Not sure if they're legal though.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an MMO.

Aka account-based authentication.

Aka your entire first paragraph is n/a.

Re:Still not going to work...

[WSOGMM]

Yeah you could probably get a laptop that would run it fine for less than $400... better yet, you could get a desktop that would run it for $300. Fry's always has good deals if you don't want to build your computer. Or you can just buy one off someone else. I think either way, it would still be cheaper and easier to just get a new computer.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Stormie]

running 2 instances of the same game at the same time will be very difficult if not impossible for many games. Most will check to see if multiple license keys are in use at the same time with online play, and to my knowledge, installing 2 copies of the same game on the same computer using different keys is not something that will work either since that is a use that was never designed into the games

Bear in mind that the games mentioned by the questioner are MMORPGs, which generally are friendly towards running more than one instance on one PC. You need two subscriptions, of course.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Anonymous Coward]

This comes out to about $500. Last I checked, XP home *IS* required to play Windows games, and sells for ~$199+ tax.

Regarding the multi-seat setup... well, others have already talked about it. My experience is mostly with installing the program in several places / hard drives.

Now, your point about the extra account is valid, since Heroes / Villains requires one full-paying login (subaccounts otherwise just kick out the login prior logins.) If you have that, bringing you down about $30 a month, then you also need to have some bandwidth. Heroes is normally OK on DSL, but I would recommend cable (patch days tended to get annoying below 2MB speeds)

Once you have registered the second account, you can PROBABLY install the secondary client in another folder. CoH doesn't make use of windows profiles, so it will try to dump its data folder in Program Files --BEWARE VISTA USERS, YOUR OS HATES COH BEING THERE AND YOU'LL HAVE TO INSTALL TO C:\USERS\PUBLIC\COH\ or something.
If you use the screenshot function, note that pics will be harder to manage

You'll still have to run full game patches for each install, since CoH doesn't run at all until it's fully up to date. If you stop playing for a whole month, updates will overwhelm you, but there's a workaround...One can safely copy one COH folder to a second folder and run the app from its new home. It's pretty tame, only saying something like "CoH needs to be reinstalled, please choose destination" but once you select the correct new folder, it finds the files are already there and won't really download and install stuff. The hard part is probably making each shortcut point to the right place.

Re:Still not going to work...

[DerekLyons]

CoX will allow you to run two instances from one install. I do it all the time to xfer stuff between characters using two accounts.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can skip the XP license, CoH works just fine under Cedega/Crossover Games. It probably works fine under plain vanilla Wine but I haven't tested that.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Anonymous Coward]

One easy way to get two games running (if they're sufficiently older) is to use Wine. I've used it to run two copies of Guild Wars simultaneously on my notebook (with its little GeForce 8400M GS).

The only thing I'm unsure about is getting multiple input devices to work on individual X screens or something.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most will check to see if multiple license keys are in use at the same time with online play, and to my knowledge, installing 2 copies of the same game on the same computer using different keys is not something that will work either since that is a use that was never designed into the games and they will usually check to se if it is already installed and basically say that it is already installed on the computer. And for most MMORPGs you are not allowed to connect two sessions/characters online at the same time, so that will be something you need to look at as well.

I don't know about other MMOs, but WoW (I know he's playing CoH) passes the buck of license keys to the account server. Meaning that you buy a license and that lets you create an account, then that license is dead and the software is just a client for ANY account.

While it is true you can't play 2 characters from 1 account at the same time (blizzard has claimed to be investigating this), it is perfectly acceptable to play 1 character from 2 different accounts. I have 2 accounts, and I regularly switch back and forth.

When I'm feeling inspired or I need to do some transacting, I can just start WoW twice and log into each account on a different instance of the WoW client. If I set the gfx down, I can even run both windows at the same time.

I can dual-box, to control both windows with one keyboard using autohotkey. That doesn't really give me mouse control over the 2nd window, but in WoW the hotkeys/hotbars are the important part. I just use a /follow hotkey to move the 2nd character.

I have poked around in the autohotkey api and it looks like 2 mice is no dice, but you could get 2 keyboards working with not much trouble. There are probably some scripts like this already out there.

Re:Still not going to work...

[T.E.D.]

you will also have the issue of game license issues due to only having one computer, running 2 instances of the same game at the same time will be very difficult if not impossible for many games.

Yup. Flat out won't work with CoH. We share one account at my house. A second login attempt on the same account will both fail and kick the logged-in session out of the game. Additionally, it is inevitable that they will eventually both want to play at the same time, and she will get upset. I would highly suggest dude get his girlfriend her own account.

Since the expansion came out, I've seen it for sale at Target for $10, which is a damn good deal considering a month of gameplay normally costs $15.

Re:Still not going to work...

[Fallen Kell]

Not sure where you have been buying your copies of XP or Vista, but my last 3 copies of XP cost $85, $110, and $110 respectively, and that was a couple years ago. My last copy of Vista Ultimate cost me $114 and the one before that cost $149. Did I find some deals, heck yes, but that doesn't mean that you can't do as well as I did. So, I stand by my ~$100 for the OS.

In fact, without doing more than a google products search, you can get a full version (not upgrade) of MS XP Pro w/SP2 for ~$70 right now. I am sure you can get Vista Home or Premium in the neighborhood of $120 without too much trouble. While I manged to score Vista Ultimate in that ballpark range, I got them from when Circuit City went out of business and when CompUSA went out of business respectively.

A relationship obviously not built on respect

[mkanoap]

"she has a cute little notebook.... what amounts to a passing phase."

Are this condescending to your fiance directly, or just when she is not around?

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a full time femenist or just a whiner over the internets?

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[mkanoap]

Are you a full time femenist or just a whiner over the internets?

Oh come on now anonymous coward. Why can't I be both?

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[sys.stdout.write]

Oh come on, you can respect someone intellectually even if they aren't knowledgeable in a specific field.

It's not as if he said "she has a cute little interest in having a career..."

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Or I dunno maybe hes just honest about it. Anyone that has been in a relationship that lasted a decent amount of time (yeah yeah slashdot etc etc)

Has seen plenty of people having their passing interests. So stop being so defensive about something you know nothing about.

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[stephanruby]

And which part did you find condescending? "a cute little notebook" a phrase she may have very well used herself, or was it the assumption that this was a just a "passing phase" (Doesn't everyone on this planet, both genders included, myself included, have "passing phases" of one kind or another?)

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[x2A]

"Are this condescending to your fiance directly"

Aww, you meant to say "are you this condescending..." but your little rage took over and the keyboard and the words got all confusing and it was all a bit much wasn't it? But it's okay, we knew what you meant, and it's just adorable that you tried so hard!

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[mkanoap]

I wouldn't have found the "cute little notebook" phrase noteworthy if it hadn't been accompanied by the bit about his fiance's interest in his interests to be a passing phase.

Sure it might be, but by that logic, his own interest in having a computer to play games might be a passing phase. He might as well give her his computer and assume he won't want it after he gets over his "wanting to play video games with his wife" phase.

An easy test is to flip it around. If she told him he could NOT have something because "it's just going to be a phase", would he be miffed? And if she turned around and announced it on the internet, might he not feel even more belittled? Maybe not, but it would be understandable if he was.

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[mkanoap]

Excellent point, that would have been a lot more clear cut. I'm probably reading to much into it.

But it still sounds like "her interest in playing games with me is a phase" which is a sad sentiment about someone you plan to spend your life with. Or even just "her interest in playing computer games is a phase" which would sound very bizarre if it were said about a guy.

Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect

[bFusion]

Mostly because guys are generally referred to as "him" or "his"

VM software maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm at the comparing features phase of learning about virtual machines, but I was wondering if something like VMware workstation (or equivalent to run on a the AMD64) can output different VM's at the same time to a dual head setup?

Anyone know of freeware that could pull this off and not bury the system?

sage

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe you have a fiance. Enjoy your Slashdot-designed basement-bargain multibox XP/Gold farming solution.

2 Girls...

[Anonymous Coward]

...1 CPU?

Priorities out of line

[Vermyndax]

Dude, wtf? You aren't going to be married long with this line of thinking. Get off of it and buy your woman a fantastic gaming machine and forget this crap. It shows you care. Priorities, man. She IS paying attention to your choices.

Seriously. WTH.

Re:Priorities out of line

[sys.stdout.write]

WTH: WTF for Christians.

Re:Priorities out of line

[PRMan]

WTHeck. Shows what Slashdot knows about Christians...

Re:Priorities out of line

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously. i've bought more computers for my wife than me. she's my wife; i can put up with crap, but she shouldn't have to. even when i couldn't take it anymore and recently made myself a killer gaming pc, i made her one too.

a couple that games together (in equality) stays together! just put the money down.

Re:Priorities out of line

[T.E.D.]

...or better yet, buy yourself a new PC and give her your old one. :-)

Re:Priorities out of line

[pbhj]

WTH: WTF for Christians.

Why replace "what-the-flip" with "what-the-heck"?

Re:Priorities out of line

[Anonymous Coward]

For Christians? I'm a Christian and I use WTF (what the fudge) all the time.

Re:Priorities out of line

[miracles]

Absolutely! It's your wife and she's interested in gaming. She should have her own machine.

I bought my g/f a PC

[dave562]

I just put together a $200 TigerDirect (I know, may I burn in hell) special for her and slapped in a GeForce 6800. She and I play WoW together every once in a while. She doesn't have the patience to raid, but she likes questing and running the occassional instance.

Don't let her get into mmo's.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not worth it. She'll gain 20 pounds, lose her job, and end up blowing her 19 year old guild leader when she takes a trip to go "see her parents" so she can get some extra dkp.

I'm not bitter.

Re:Don't let her get into mmo's.

[SwabTheDeck]

Its not worth it. She'll gain 20 pounds, lose her job, and end up blowing her 19 year old guild leader when she takes a trip to go "see her parents" so she can get some extra dkp.

In my book, gaining 20 pounds results in a 50 DKP MINUS!

Re:Don't let her get into mmo's.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tim, is that you?

betwin

[jimmydevice]

Try betwin. I used it to share my laptop with my daughter while in the field.
You can download a demo that is time limited, you have to restart it after one Hr.
Unfortunately, I don't know how much $$$ the full version is.

Re:betwin Ouch!

[jimmydevice]

$99 a seat! See all comments above for cheaper solution.

You could have it engraved....

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy her the first of a series of nice machines. Sony was nice enough to engrave the (now 5th? 6th?) one I got for my Mrs. of 15 years this year (a nice Vaio mostly for watching Dr. Who), engraved on it 'At least it is not a drill.'. There you go. So, either cough up the dough, play m.p. games on a console (like the Wii perhaps?) or...take turns, one watches, the other plays, switch on every other death. Or something. Good luck!

Parentheses!

[clint999]

Just get the cheapest inspiron from dell and dump the integrated graphics for...anything that's not integrated. Then you won't have to worry about virtual machines with direct graphics access or any other time sucking rough spots.Also, if you can wait a few weeks, keep checking the best buy circular for the coupon code for the extra-discounted cheap dell machine.

You need a server

[Runaway1956]

Desktop environments - especially WINDOWS desktop environments - will not allow two people to log onto the same hardware at the same time.

Oddly enough, most Linux distros come with an X-server installed. Just create an account for her, she can log in, then direct the video output to her own netbook, or to a second monitor, or whatever.

To do anything similar on Windows, you MUST install a Windows Server, whether it be Win2K, Win2003, or Win2008. You CANNOT log multiple people on at the same time with Win9x, ME, XP, or Vista or Win7. Microsoft won't allow it, you ain't doing it without some SERIOUS hacking.

Re:You need a server

[gparent]

Actually the instructions don't require SERIOUS HACKING. The hacking has been done for you, and it simplies requires to replace a DLL and make a registry change.

http://www.google.com/search?q=multiple+remote+desktop

Re:You need a server

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could do a simple Google search, find a hacked dll and simply drop it onto your Vista/7/XP machine allowing multiple sessions for free.

http://remotedesktoprdp.com/Multiple-Remote-Desktop-Sessions.aspx

But maybe I am not DRAMATIC enough for SERIOUS hacking!

Can it be done?

[Chas]

Sure. Is it worth it? No.

I set up a dual user computer

[ethana2]

..wtih Ubuntu 8.04 and userful. I had to use the same gpu for both seats, and neither had 3d accel. Doing what you want seems like it may require having multiple identical gpu's. You may have to wait for MultiDisplay Manager to make it into Xorg, in addition to WINE supporting the game you want to play (Maybe Direct3D gallium frontend or something.) Right now? Rent a rig or something.

NComputing

[jrottman]

I work for an Education Management company, where we have about 57 schools across the nation. This past year we deployed NComputing (http://www.ncomputing.com). This setup involves dropping a PCI card in to a desktop computer, then connecting up to 3 additional small black box stations that have their own PS2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, and a VGA port for the monitor. The black box stations are connected back to the 'host' desktop via CAT5 cable. While this setup does effectively allow multiple users to simultaneously log in to the same machine, complications often due arise, such as software/applications that can not have multiple instances running at the same time. Also we experienced random crashing of the 'host' desktop and all connected stations.

It's never worth while

[holophrastic]

Really, to use that program, or things like it, you still need a second video card. And even if you don't, by the time you have the input devices, speakers, screen, and game licence, what have you saved? You've saved about $400 of computer. Maybe $800.

If you planned to die tomorrow, then the $800 loss wouldn't matter. If you don't, then the $800 of extra hardware will eventually come in useful, even if she never plays again.

But most importantly, if you want her to enjoy it, and you want her to start gaming regularly, it's not going to happen when things just barely function with glue and shoestring.

Now, if you want her to have a bad experience as a way of convincing her to either not use your machine, or to buy a second machine, then you've got the right idea.

But hey, we're computer people. Advizing someone to buy another computer is about the easiest thing we can do.

I've done it.

[Kris_J]

I've used BeTwin to run two simultaneous instances of Diablo 2 for a small LAN game. It worked okay, but at US$99 for a single license, there are probably cheaper ways to run old games.

I have an idea that isn't RDP!

[thatkid_2002]

Multisteating Windows is crap. But heres an idea of how it could be done with Windows. This idea does not involve Virtual Machines (not suitable for games) or RDP (also NOT SUITABLE FOR GAMES FOR THE LAST BLOODY TIME!).

He could use the BeTwin software which appears to give direct graphics access (good for games) - and then to deal with the fact that a lot of games (Like WoW) don't like to run two different sessions at once (unless you are on Wine) you can also do some Application Virtualization using Sandboxie (or Novell Zenworks Application Virtualization) to keep the two games somewhat separate. To fully separate the games you might need separate NICs, but they are a dime a dozen and you could probably get one for free.

Else you could buy a computer that could handle it for $300.

Well that's my two cents.

Re:I have an idea that isn't RDP!

[Samah]

...and then to deal with the fact that a lot of games (Like WoW) don't like to run two different sessions at once...

WoW allows multiple instances quite fine if you have separate install directories. How do you think people "multibox"?
I think what you mean is that you can't log in using the same account more than once. That doesn't stop you buying more accounts.

Re:I have an idea that isn't RDP!

[windwalkr]

WoW runs multiple instances quite fine even with a single install directory. You may need to launch the game directly rather than start through the launcher (haven't confirmed that) but we certainly have no trouble multiboxing from a single install.

In short

[Ash-Fox]

In short, does anyone have any experience with setups like this?

Since you asked in short, the answer is - Yes.

just get a fucking new computer

[moondo]

I think you're better off getting a new girlfriend.

False premise

[cerberusss]

I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase.

The underlying statement here is: "if it's a passing phase, the money will be wasted because the new PC will be gathering dust".

But actually that's totally up to yourself. If it turns out to be a passing phase, you can simply sell the computer.

Re:False premise

[TheLink]

Or retask the computer (and optionally sell the video card).

Most slashdotters are just looking for enough excuses to get another computer...

If it's really a passing phase he can end up with:

one laptop, one desktop, one "swiss army knife" computer/server. What's the problem then?

So seriously, just get her another PC. It's cheaper and more useful to a geek than a diamond ring.

There'll probably be far more expensive stuff to deal with later on in marriage. So it's not a good sign to me.

Holy Troll Bait...

[oljanx]

This one is too easy. Amazingly, it seems the majority of comments above are constructive. +Karma to the crowd. Also, buy a new computer for your wife.

Buy a cheap machine, add RAM and a vid card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than try to use a solution to allow a machine to have two users, which likely will cost more than a new box anyway, one can find decent deals on a low end HP or Gateway machine either as a closeout or loss leader special, or a special of the week at Costco or Sam's.

If you are not needing Crysis on its maximum settings, buying a low end machine, getting it to 4GB of RAM (or at least 3), and putting in a $50-$100 video card should do someone decently for most games. No, you won't be getting triple digit FPS with settings on max, but it will at least be decently playable.

Applica

[bloodandsoil]

The product you are asking about is called Applica. I know because I worked for this company for 4 years, developing this product that allows more than one user on a single PC. The product consists of a proprietary PCI card which connects with an ethernet cable. At the other end of the cable is another proprietary box with connectors for pluggin in an extra monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Then, the user installs the Applica software which creates and manages the new console as a separate context from the main PC console. Both the Applica user and the main PC have fully independent desktops. http://www.applica.com/

Re:Applica

[ledow]

$260 for the version I saw, plus a new mouse, keyboard, monitor. Windows licensing? Dunno how that would work but I assume it's not allowed to use 2 people on 1 PC any more than it's allowed to use Terminal Services in similar situations without a licence.

Stop faffing about, and just damn a new damn machine. For the price of the gear mentioned above (which may or may not work with your particular application and/or 3D acceleration, is non-standard, hard to replace if it breaks etc.) you could easily get another PC without the hassle.

I can see only limited uses for Applica - EPOS possibly? - in those uses, almost always, a shared multi-seat X-Windows variant would easily do the job without buying any special cards. This is one of those products that you will never see in a shop and very, very rarely second-hand because so few people buy into it.

Re:Applica

[rally2xs]

Good grief they have an obfuscated website! You explained in 1 tiny paragraph what I would want to know as a gamer looking for the ability to run 2 people on 1 game on 1 PC, but their website uses phrases like, "sharing the resources of a commodity PC" - huh? - What's a "non-commodity" PC, and why the qualifier, anyway? And why no bulleted list of possible uses such as the gaming we're talking about. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole thing dies for lack of publicity / advertising since you can't occupy all your spare time making posts like this.

Champions

[Toonol]

It might be worth considering that Champions Online is going to be released on the 360. That might be an inexpensive way to allow both of you to access at the same time. Consoles have their own sets of disadvantages and advantages over pcs.

Re:Champions

[T.E.D.]

They want to release it on the 360. Microsoft has not agreed to this yet (shockingly, they rule their platform with an iron fist). The developers are openly musing about paying for a Playstation port if Microsoft keeps being a pain.

Even if they do approve, it isn't likely to come out until months after the PC version is released.

3D Acceleration

[IsisTheDamned]

I could imagine you can clamp together some input set per application makeshift but as soon as it comes to 3D acceleration you are boned. Oh yeah, why would you believe a computer powerful enough to run one instance of the game would be less expensive than two stock gaming machines...?

Better yet..

[msimm]

Use this as an excuse to upgrade yourself and regift her your old computer, you could even give her the new case/peripherals if you think that would make her happy.

That way the only money you're out comes from the difference between the date you purchase the system and the actual date you'd typically have upgraded the system. We get to reason a luxury purchase! Go mathematics!

COH is not WOW

[Moraelin]

COH is not WoW, though. I fancy I have a fairly high end system (dual core CPU, veloci-raptor drives, 4 GB RAM, GTX-285 graphics card with 1 GB RAM, you get the idea), and with two instances of COH, it drops to low single digit FPS in some zones or situations.

It's weird. It's not that FPS drops to half, like you'd expect. (Actually, I'd expect even less, because any half-competently programmed program wouldn't render at all when minimized. Well, if COH could stay minimized, that is.) It drops disproportionately more when dual-boxing on the same computer.

Part of it, I suspect, is also because COH doesn't actually play nice with multitasking, period. Even getting it to fucking stay minimized when I want to check something in Mozilla can be a chore. It just wants to hog the screen, no matter what. Sometimes even ALT-TAB doesn't work right out of it.

To cut a long story short, yes, for COH I'd recommend two boxes even if you wanted to dual-box by yourself.

I don't know what kind of computer could dual-box COH on the same machine, but probably it would cost a lot more than two high-enough-end machines to run an instance of COH each.

Re:COH is not WOW

[thsths]

> It's not that FPS drops to half, like you'd expect. ... It drops disproportionately more when dual-boxing on the same computer.

That could also be caused by cache contention. After all, most consumer systems have preciously little cache, and are not at all designed for multi-tasking. For this workload, a server CPU may perform much better...

Re:COH is not WOW

[evol262]

Pin them with processor affinity, unless CoH is mysteriously multithreaded now.

Re:COH is not WOW

[Ifandbut]

Even getting it to fucking stay minimized when I want to check something in Mozilla can be a chore. It just wants to hog the screen, no matter what. Sometimes even ALT-TAB doesn't work right out of it.

I wish more MMOs (or games in general) would support the borderless windowed mode that WoW uses. Granted WoW does not run as fast in borderless windowed as it does at full screen but the flexibility and ease of alt-tabbing more then makes up for a few FPS drop.

Well, that's a possibility

[Moraelin]

Well, that's certainly a possibility too.

Then again, AFAIK a dual-core CPU does have at least _some_ separate cache for each CPU. Plus, I'd feel very shafted if Intel and AMD try to sell me dual- and quad-core CPUs that "are not at all designed for multi-tasking." What's the second CPU for, then? ;)

Re:Well, that's a possibility

[TheLink]

How about the graphics card though?

Can and do both game instances use the same textures? Does everything fit fine on the card?

If no, and the card runs out of resources the FPS will drop badly.

Re:Well, that's a possibility

[Moraelin]

Well, the idea is sane enough. In fact, that's why I was saying that a competently written game would not render at all in the first place when it's minimized. If you listen to the graphic card's fan when you alt-tab out of full-screen WoW (and it neatly minimizes), it actually revs down after a while. COH keeps re-maximizing itself and rendering behind the browser anyway. I have little doubt that the same happens when running two copies of itself.

As for the textures, well, both characters were similarly dressed and in the same city zone. (I was giving some money to an alt on the other account.) Whether textures can be shared between two different processes, though, that's the better question. I don't know. It's been a decade since I had anything to do with game programming, so I'm pretty clueless about the latest and greatest DirectX or OpenGL tricks.

Still, something's weird anyway. The game runs ok in a 256 MB graphics card. Not great, but ok. On a 1024 MB graphics card, it should be able to fit in two instances IMHO. Though exactly how it handles swapping textures in there, I wouldn't know.

Re:Well, that's a possibility

[NYFreddie]

Multi-tasking is not the same thing as multi-threading.

Re:Well, that's a possibility

[Moraelin]

Point taken and true, but IMHO it would still be a piss-poor multi-core architecture that can only multithread and is no good at multitasking.

Re:Well, that's a possibility

[drinkypoo]

Then again, AFAIK a dual-core CPU does have at least _some_ separate cache for each CPU.

Each processor has its own L1 cache, but sharing the L2 cache is SOP these days. Intel Q9000 has 6MB of L2 cache shared between four cores! It does have a TDP about the same as a Core 2 Duo at the same clock though.

Toughest question

[kav2k]

One of the problems mentioned seems the toughest to me - get 2 different applications on a same Windows system to use different input devices sets (keyboard+pointing device). Is that even possible?

same here

[Anonymous Coward]

I had this exact same situation 3 years ago with COH.

I ended up getting a second COH account for her, and rebuilt her machine to handle it.

if you don't get her own PC and her own account, after 2 weeks, you wont be able to use your computer.

FPS

[garphik]

So the requirement can be boiled down to something like this, The rasterization happens at the server end (having 3d hardware) and the image generated should be transferred to the clients. This can be speeded up by using compression / encoding etc. but in the end getting a FPS = 30 which makes the game playable is not an easy task doing it real time. Maybe this has to be looked at from a different perspective or its not practical in real case ...

Vocab Nazi Strikes

[Omni-Cognate]

Reticent

Reluctant

Get it right, people!

You are wrong, heres why:

[Tei]

{{Can we collectively as a community agree to stop answering these with things like "here's a solution: don't do what you're trying to do"?}}

Is a fine solution, often is the right solution, maybe the 60% of the times. Think about a newbie tryiing to put a square peg into a circle hole. Google will *NOT* tell to stop searching that. Yahooo will *NOT* tell then to stop. No machine will stop and think.. "Wait.. what you are tryiing is stupid, maybe is feasible but even If you make it works, it will suck". And here is another difference Man vs Machine. We can reject questions that are erroneous.

So, obviusly, once a newbie as ask all machines, and all machine-soluble problems are done, there are a few no-machine-soluble problems. Most of these are "the error is the questions" type.

So you are wrong.

Mod this up

[CarpetShark]

Priorities, man. She IS paying attention to your choices.

Couldn't have said it better. After all, it seems she's actually taking the time to be interested in something the poster is interested in. Newsflash: she probably doesn't give a crap about the game. But she would like a new computer for her efforts to indulge, I'm sure.

I mean, come on... it's a computer. They're not exactly rare items these days. I bought both my niece and nephew good computers when I bought my last one. Both went unused for ages because their parents were afraid of the net. I'm still glad I did it though.

Re:Mod this up

[mkanoap]

Amen!

Lamest excuse ever for justifying a second monitor

[mattia]

Man, this is the lamest excuse I ever heard for justifying the expense for a second monitor.

I can imagine trying this line out with my wife:
"really dear, we need to buy this second 24'' lcd so you can play with me on my computer ..." .. whatever ...

Two Instances Logged into Same Account?

[CrazyChinaman]

I know for my MMO, and for many others, you can't log into more than 1 character off of 1 account at the same time. I can run two instances of the game, and log into two seperate accounts (for market/vending/extra-storage purposes) at the same time. But if I try to log in a second time under 1 account, the first instance get's disconnected...

Games are demanding

[Krneki]

There is no way you can run two 3D demanding games on the same PC. Maybe Vista has some advanced 3D engine to host 2 user, but I doubt it.

VM still lacks support for GPU, so it won't work either.

The cheapest solution would be a cheap overclocked system. Buy a reliable motherboard from Asus and overclock an Intel Dual-core CPU.

I bought an Intel dual-core E4300, 1.8 GHZ almost 2 years ago and at 3.2GHz is still able to give me 60FPS in almost any new game.

Re:Games are demanding

[Anonymous Coward]

VM still lacks support for GPU, so it won't work either.

I think VirtualBox supports 3D Accel!

Re:Games are demanding

[Krneki]

Only if you know how to hack this things and even then you still have a long way to make it usable.

Re:Games are demanding

[UltimApe]

virutalbox can do my ubuntu virtual machine and still run graphics... opengl at least, for the composting on it!

Ask People Over 40

[Wingsy]

"... does anyone have any experience with setups like this?" Oh yeah, mainframes were in most every large company a few decades ago. Perhaps you should get yourself a 360. (ummm... not talkin about Xbox either)

Best Solution IMO

[zukinux]

hey there,
I think the best solution for this issue is using linux as a os, with 2 desktop sessions, one per each monitor.
afterwards, you should map each controller to each virtual desktop you're using. if you need Windows in-order to run these games (I'm not familiar with them), just install VirtualBox with windows on it, and run 2 different sessions of it, each in every virtual desktop. now, you need to run initial run to each game (in each VirtualBox) and just play using the 2 controllers. Another thing you need to do, is SetFocus, for each controller in each VirtualDesktop, so in-case someone of you click on the controller, it will be focused in his session while if a 0.10 seconds later the other player will click in his own controller, the focus should be automatically set on the other's player VirtualBox within his own Virtual Desktop session.

Good LUCK!

Passing phase?

[todd10k]

MMORPG, passing phase, temporary. yeah right. Good luck nursing that addiction.

Re:Passing phase?

[night_flyer]

I can quit at any time!

What kind of a geek are you?

[jayhawk88]

I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase.

It works like this: She gets your current gaming computer, you then reluctantly get to go out and buy a quad core with 8 gig of RAM and a gig video card. This is the way of the geek relationship.

Re:What kind of a geek are you?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAH. This is so true. I did this for my fiance and will likely happen again when I pass my first gen macbook to her for one of the new aluminum ones!

Autohotkey

[Imperpetual]

One way that you could do this is to use something such as AutoHotkey which will allow you to filter inputs and send them to a specific application to allow both of you to play at once. It would require the use of a more glorified script like those written for multiboxing in WoW or other games. Check out autohotkeys site and look around for some premade scripts. Their language has a very straightforward API with a knowledgable fan base, I'm sure you can come up with something.

Use the Netbook!

[TheNetAvenger]

Yes your netbook is not the best gaming platform.

However, I play City of Heroes even on my Acer One that I had to pick up on a trip(yes the $49.99 model that you get with the ATT 3G contract) It is a 1.6 Atom with 1GB of RAM, and after about a week I ripped of XP and installed Windows 7, which is surprisingly much faster on the little unit, better on battery and suspends and hibernates almost instantly.

It has a 945 GM950 video chipset that sucks

However, if you crank down the settings, you can get 15-20fps out of the game.

And yes Win7 is faster than XP for gaming on the netbook, even with 1GB of RAM. (Use the Vista Drivers from June 2008, the Win7 drivers from Intel still kind of suck.)

So install Win7 on the Netbook, and get by with that.

If you are focused on multi-user, again Win7, get the multi-user patch or buy dual input devices, so that focus isn't stolen from one Window, and start with a beefy CPU, and at least a dual GPU solution. (But you are going to be better off buying a cheap second computer, truly...)

--------------------

Things that would make the netbook a 'bit' better, that I haven't tested yet for City of Heroes:

-Replace the RAM and moving the system to 1.5GB.

-There is the GMABOOSTER type of application that will set the GMA 950 to 400mhz if you don't care about battery power (and no it is not technically overclocking it.)

Re:Multiseat - MOD PARENT UP

[MrKaos]

This is one of the great joys of X11 - separate X11 logins. The Nvidia drivers support this quite easily.

It would be the least expensive way to do it.

Multi-seat + Cedega / WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

Other posts mention Multi-seat linux. That is what you are looking for, plus WINE. At most, you will need to buy an extra graphics card. To run games on legacy systems, test it first under WINE. You get better performance and compatibility for games on WINE on Linux than you do for MS Vista. There are some that won't even run under WINE, though, so for those check out Cedega.

What to do about those suggesting Windows server? Double-tap to be sure.

It's Simple

[kd5zex]

1. Buy her a computer
2. Impregnate her.
3. Welcome baby
4. Sell computer on Ebay/Craigslist
5. Spend the rest of your life paying for medical bills, school lunches and bail bonds.

Re:Lamest excuse ever for justifying a second moni

[kd5zex]

Mod parent up!

Don't F this up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your girlfriend will think you're a fag if you make her use Linux for ANYTHING. Don't listen to these guys. Most Linux users are zealots and therefore are unpleasant to be around and don't know anything about women.

Get her a nice stylish laptop running windows.

Just rent a computer

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is honestly just a passing phase, instead of getting some pretty unique peripherals that you'd never use again, why not just rent a computer that will do the job?

You think COH crawls on a netbook?

[riyley]

Try running multiple instances through a thin-client. Unless you're running some experimental MIT/IBM shit, I guarantee your computer is going to drag. Plus, you just said her character is on your account. I don't play COH, so maybe i'm missing something, but are multiple characters from one account allowed to play simultaneously? If you want to play together, shell out the money for a second PC that can handle the game. Get a nice lcd monitor for yourself so she can use the old one (or vice-versa). And be happy!

synergy...

[hesaigo999ca]

synergy so far is the only software based shared kvm like program, that lets you run multitudes of computers from the same kvm environment. as for getting a real kvm switch, this is always ok, except you will have to switch between computers instead of actually forcing spread control from the keyboard amongst the comps.

I'm trying to say it's not an exclusive or

[Moraelin]

Going with the assumption that this is a young couple, not even married yet, if they were more towards the norm, sex WOULD be one of the primary items on the agenda.

I'm not going to comment much about most the rest, since others beat me to it, but at the very least what I'm trying to say is this: there's a long way between "primry items on the agenda" and being the _only_ thing you do together.

Because that's the crux of the matter. Whenever someone asks something along the lines of "how would I go about doing X with my GF/fiancee/wife?" there has to be someone who'll chime in with "try having sex with her instead." Which, even skipping past the psychology considerations, would only work if you can genuinely fill a day with only sex. Because otherwise it still leaves plenty of room to do something else together, be it a MMO or, like in Tom Lehrer's song, "poisoning pigeons in the park", or whatever else.

There are 16 hours awake in a Sunday or Saturday. That is, if you don't skip any sleep. You can't have sex 16 hours in a row. Well, not without marinating yourself in medicines, anyway. Try even doing pelvic thrusts at the empty air (or wiggling your tongue, since an AC earlier suggested the tongue as a solution) for 16 hours straight and then tell me how those muscles feel after that exercise.

Nobody says not to have sex. Nobody says not to be interested in sex. Yes, ideally you'd have some of that too.

But the real keyword in there is the "too."

Relationship "solutions" which imply doing only sex, instead and to the exclusion of any other activity together, just tell me that whoever comes up with those (I mean the OP, not you) hasn't actually had either sex or a real relationship. And I mean with a woman whose last name isn't .avi, .mpeg or .wmv ;)

Even shorter: it's not an exclusive or.

True, but, for heterosexual men, they can satisfy 99% of those needs on their own, but, for sex they need the woman there. Self satisfaction jokes aside. Face it, the old joke of "Why did God give women breasts? So men would talk to them" holds a lot of merit.

If a guy didn't want women for sex, he'd not likely give them much attention otherwise...

Well, I could comment about the mysoginism there, but as I was saying others beat me to it. But even so, what I'm trying to say is:

1. Regardless, even if _you_ (think you) don't need a woman for anything but sex, she does need you for more than sex. It's not a sex doll you can just deflate and pack somewhere until your next erection. You usually have to maintain that relationship with more activities than just having sex.

2. I'm not buying it. Yes, it's a popular pretense in today's culture, but I don't buy it. If men were really that self-sufficient and free from half of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we wouldn't have half as much jealousy and insecurity around.

Two girls

[Anonymous Coward]

Two girls, one CPU?

Cheap Refurbs?

[frission]

I picked up a scratch & dent computer, dual core 2.6, 3 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive for $220 from the dell outlet.
http://www.dell.com/outlet
Considering it came with a licensed OS, it was cheaper than me building one.
just keep an eye on there, because they go quick. if it turns out that you can buy a better computer than what you have, just keep the new one and give her the old one...win-win?

I have run into this problem before

[spider256]

Take a look at this: http://popcopy.blogspot.com/2008/12/enable-multi-user-concurrent-logon-for.html

Virtual Machine - 2 OS instances, 1 computer

[Anonymous Coward]

If your computer is powerful enough, look into working with a virtual machine. There are some linux distributions and programs that allow two virtual machines running simultaneously. The way that you would do this is use a 2+ KVM switch and have the virtual machines take input from one of the ports.

The downside to this is that it is a bear to setup and debug and it's even more of a bear if your system isn't powerful enough. If you can't dual box on your machine, you should probably not attempt this.

define "cheap"

[doti]

that's the mentality that's killing the planet.

think about all the poisonous materials used for production, let alone dispose of the computer.

Quit being such a cheapskate

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy another system, it can't be very expensive, and if she loses interest in MMO's you can box on your favorite and drop farm or raise pets. I'm betting that she won't lose interest very quickly because MMO's are kinda like Slayer, If ya like them even a little bit you'll get sucked in and be a rabid fan forever.

My two cents

[Defectuous]

These days you can build or buy a relatively economical PC. Thou I would go with separate accounts.

One slashdot oversight...

[damn_registrars]

Sure the easy suggestion is to do as so many people already have and advise that the guy in question buy another PC. However there is one thing that it seems we are overlooking here:

The cost of administering an additional (presumably windows) PC. Going from the care and feeding routine of one to the same for two is not trivial, especially if both systems are used regularly. And few women consider windows administration to be a sexy task for their man to do.

Passing phase?

[Ravenscall]

What, she is a girl so this will not be more than a phase? Great relationship you got going there.

On the technical end, you can build a pretty economical gaming rig on the cheap, and it is going to be worlds better than any shared solution.

balls

[Anonymous Coward]

grow some

just spend the money

[cyn1c77]

Since she is your fiance, I am surprised you haven't figured this out by now.

Women cost money. Just buy her a computer. It will be a savings in the long run, because time spent gaming isn't time spent shopping.

Using 1 powerful machine to power remote machines

[Anonymous Coward]

A linux operating system can support multiple users remotely connected. This will allow the 1 computer running linux to run any number of applications for any number of users who remotely connect to it. The video and audio can be piped to the remote computer you are accessing it from, so technically you can say that it is doing all the work and streaming you the pieces you need.

The only problem is that linux is not something most people can pick up and use without some experience, help or time enough to read manuals. The other, possibly larger issue with this is that most game developers only develop for windows. The only viable option if you wanted to proceed running a windows application on a linux machine would be to have some sort of emulation software like wine to run the game on the linux console. But emulators like wine cost a great deal of cpu, and taking into account the amount of cpu required to power most games, it wouldn't be very lag free to do this multiple times.

Of course, I am assuming you have an average computing system and not any top of the line cpu or multiple sli video processing setups.

So, in short. If you had a powerful enough linux computer dual, possibly quad core, and a good video card(s), and wine worked on your game, then theoretically you can play the game on a small number of remote computers without requiring much computing power on the remote systems.

This what you had in mind?

[LinkFree]

This company offers software that allows you to run multiple sessions off of one computer, with separate monitors and inputs.

Their software is open source, and the larger part of their customer base are in developing nations, allowing institutions to provide more terminals at lower cost (Only needing to purchase one machine to serve, for example, 5 or more people.)

Omni-TS

[IgorMrBean]

You are probably looking for this, http://www.omni-ts.com/linux-desktop/ (linux only...)

Concurrent Logins

[myleague]

If she already has a netbook then let her keep it, chances are you're using XP, google concurrent logins, this hacks XP with TS files to allow more than one login at a time. Then she can MSTSC from her netbook to your workstation without disrupting you. Cost $0, takes about 10 minutes and a few reboots. As far as the woman playing being a phase... my money is on her frustrating you to the point you give it up before she ever does. She enjoys the time with you, in men's minds she's an invader. Good luck with it.

Reluctant != recitenct.

[StikyPad]

That word, reticent.. I do not think it means what you think it means.

That's right, I'm adorable

[mkanoap]

My person religion prevents me from using the word "you" on Thor's day, as this is the day that it's all about ME!

Thank you for being so understanding!

Re:That's right, I'm adorable

[x2A]

haha that's like the guy in southpark who has a bone condition that stops him pronouncing the 't' in 'planetarium' *lol* :-)

Ncomputing

[Anonymous Coward]

I, too, wish for the day when each American family will own a $2,500-4,000 rack mount server connected via GigE to all rooms in the house. Every room in the house would then only have a KVM and audio with USB inputs for external devices. These "workstations" would each have their own username and sessions to the server. ANDDDD (here's the part none of the KVMoIP guys seem to understand) the family needs 3D GAMING across this 100ft cable as well as BLURAY PLAYBACK. You give me a $700 KVMoGigE product that does this and I will buy one for everyone I know who has a computer.

What you guys don't seem to get is that we are not using the computers we have. Why would I want to buy another cheaper POS system that I also only use 5-10% of (not counting gaming periods)? When instead, I could have a dual quadcore server with SLI graphics and 8-16gb of ram :) (throw all the $300 computer money into the server fund)

The closest thing I've come across to allow you to do this is NComputing.com. You can conventionally KVM the console access and SLI graphics cards while sending three non-gaming sessions over Cat6 (non-IP). This is still not exactly what we need to play blurays and 3d games remotely on the same PC. But it is sure damn close.

Ncomputing.com offers a non-3d setup for $170 on tigerdirect. It allows you to play dvds and browse the net and office docs across tons of PCs for cheap. No bluray, no gaming, 33ft range limitation, and only 1024x768 res.

If they will make a product geared towards American family needs instead of third world countries, you would all find buying another computer is a ridiculous and wasteful answer that could instead be solved by a glorius multiseat rack server solution. I still await this product in the future.

Anonymous Coward.

[Anonymous Coward]

First and foremost...
Does the game allow you to run 2 instances at once AND login to the same account on both instances?

World of Warcraft does not, as when you login a second time the first session gets booted.

HotKeyNet, maybe?

[BobMcD]

http://hotkeynet.com/index.html

I use this for multi-boxing WoW, and it seems like it could handle the input. Perhaps run her copy against a different monitor, and use hotkeynet to pipe the input over to yours?

(And for multiboxing WoW, I just LOVE the PiP. It is SO awesome to be able to reach up and click on the little screen and use healbot...)

Cheap? Try *very* cheap.

[fm6]

Better yet, look at those off-lease business computers, the kind with no PCI slots and an external power supply. Big companies lease them by the ton, and then ditch them after a few years. Brand new, they're maybe overpriced, but used, they cost a pittance. If you pay more than $150, you're getting ripped off. Lots of them on eBay; "external power supply" is a good way to find them.

Doesn't sound like a good gaming computer? Well, I'm not a serious gamer, but the Dell SX270 I have does quite well with 3D graphics. And the Intel 865 graphics chipset is on the CoH recommended list. If you're looking at a computer with a different graphic chipset, compare it against the recommendations on help.ncsoft.com.

unconnected controller

[evilmousse]

just give her a controller, any controller, doesn't have to be attached, and tell her that your monitor is what she's playing. /works for my 4 year old niece //what? ///no really, what?

Been there done that

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had my Gentoo box set up for multiseat. Warning one: do not use old PCI video cards. Me and my roommate could play UT2004 at the same time. But on the PCI card it sucked bibles. I you want to do multiseat get an SLI PCIex board and two PCIex video cards. Warning two: two audio cards makes things much easier for splitting audio to multiple sources. Warning three: multiseat works best for general internet browsing, videos, word processing, etc. If you want to game, multiple computers are more cost effective. Warning four: Windows sucks. You can multiseat basically any newer Linux distro and run a VM Windows in each seat. For the most part doing what you want to do isn't that hard but; games want all the horsepower they can get.

Virtualbox

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this a couple of times, so that a friend could play counterstrike with me on my laptop with a nice video card. I installed virtualbox freeware edition(http://www.virtualbox.org), and installed a copy of Windows XP inside it (I had an old valid key). I installed the Vbox guest additions, which allow for a lot of cool features, including 3d acceleration within the host. I installed a USB keyboard, mouse and audio, and had the virtual machine grab them. Lastly, I hooked up an external monitor, dragged the VM onto it, and made it fullscreen. At this point, I was able to control my Vista host with my laptop keyboard and one mouse, and the XP host with the other set, and we even had distinct audio. Oh, I also had to disable mouse pointer integration to help keep the mice separate...I think. But it was awhile ago, and I haven't messed with it for a bit, so my memory is kinda shaky. That betwin software sounds easier, as I had to do quite a bit of work to set this up and work out the bugs, but if you have an old license to XP lying around, the rest is free, and you get to geek out.

Someone should mention routers too

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should perhaps chip in and tell this guy what routers are for. A lot of people less technically minded are still stuck thinking it's one internet connection per computer. So then that backwards thinking would lead to a solution multiple gaming sessions on the same computer. (And there's no other valid reason that would lead to wanting that other than being really really cramped for space. Although I'm sure if one knew where to look, they could probably find one case or another made to hold multiple motherboards in minimal space. I believe those are called mini-server cases?)

If the guy has a netbook, there's probably a wireless router sitting around somewhere already. There should still be a few extra sockets for things beyond the primary computer and network printer. Just get another computer setup already and some cheap ethernet cable, it not that expensive and it really is the easiest way.

Oh this idea again...

[Douglas Goodall]

Over the years this idea has surfaced a number of times. In fact I used to sell something of this sort. When computers costed five thousand dollars there was a financial reason to do this. Sharing one computer for two users taxes the CPU resources and causes sluggish operation. Much of the cost of such a rig is the two monitors and keyboards and mouses and audio. These days with computers that cost only several hundred dollars, and less used, it is just as well to use separate computers. There are lots of slightly down-level computers laying around. Try a computer recycling center near your home.

ESX

[GWBasic]

Install ESX as a hypervisor, and then create a VM for you and another for your partner. ESX lets you dedicate PCI devices to a specific VM, so you can dedicate one graphics card and USB card for you; and another pair of cards for your partner.