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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?"
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.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
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.
http://www.bistolas.net
search?q=2+players+1+computer
Woah! You almost had me fooled and made me click on that link!
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.
You're asking a bunch of dorks about a technical question concerning the opposite sex?
head explodes
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.
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.
Gamer with a fiancee? I can't believe you guys fell for this obvious troll attempt.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
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!
Ask Slashdot, Get Slashdot
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.
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.
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?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Seriously, stop being sensible on Slashdot, you're spoiling it for the rest of us..
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.
Well they say sex is like air, is a much bigger deal to people deprived of it :-)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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
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.