Possible to span gameex across dual displays?

[popcorrin]

I wouldn't necessarily have to span gameex across 2 displays but what I basically want to do is display gameex on the primary display as you normally would but I would like to display the marquee artwork on the secondary display.

[headkaze]

Check out GameEx's built in "Game Extender". It can display the artwork on a secondary monitor or even over a network.

[popcorrin]

Check out GameEx's built in "Game Extender". It can display the artwork on a secondary monitor or even over a network.

I tried it awhile ago and it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. Also, I never could get it to work exactly right. Never centered on screen, part of image cut off. Also there was no choice on what was displayed.

I'm kind of glad I have your attention Headkaze. I was also thinking of using cpwizard to create a bunch of pngs where the top half of the image would be the marquee and the bottom half of the image would be the controls. Didn't know if this was possible. I was also wondering if it would be possible to display the images on the secondary monitor while the game was played on the primary monitor.

One other thing I thought about was using a 3rd monitor on the control panel just for displaying the controls. So that would put the game on the primary monitor, the marquee on the display 2 and the control image on display 3. Would that be possible or am I going a little over the top?

[bkenobi]

There's currently no way to do that natively with GameEx, however that doesn't mean it can't be done. Multiple displays could be just set up to run a program that displays an image. That image could be updated when the file in a directory changes. Then, when you launch a game, you could have a command launch prior to running that copies the appropriate image to the right directories. In fact, maybe you could just make a web page that displays an image in full screen. Set that browser to the appropriate display. Put a timer on the web page to automatically update (or use AHK/AI scripts to trigger it) and then just replace the image with the one you want to display.

You can create the image you are talking about in batch, but I'm not sure of the procedure. Basically, you would use CP Wizard to generate the controls png and then combine that with the marquee. It may be trivial, I just don't know what program to use to batch create the images.

Just my quick thoughts though...

[headkaze]

CPWizard supports output to a secondary monitor. But right now it doesn't show while your playing Mame, you still have to press the pause button, but I've always wanted to implement that feature. I don't know about having 3 monitor support (probably wont happen), but I could aways add a feature to have the CP show for a few seconds then rotate through artwork on the secondary monitor. I guess the best thing would be to have a bunch of configuration options to say what is shown and for how long etc.

[popcorrin]

CPWizard supports output to a secondary monitor. But right now it doesn't show while your playing Mame, you still have to press the pause button, but I've always wanted to implement that feature. I don't know about having 3 monitor support (probably wont happen), but I could aways add a feature to have the CP show for a few seconds then rotate through artwork on the secondary monitor. I guess the best thing would be to have a bunch of configuration options to say what is shown and for how long etc.

Thanks for the responses guys.

I thought the 3rd monitor might be pushing it, would be cool though. One thing I was thinking about was the bezels in mame. Can they be set up to span multiple displays or is 1 display the limit?

[Tom Speirs]

You know generally this could be done with a GameEx plugin probably pretty easily. What exactly are you looking for it to do (ie spec).

[popcorrin]

You know generally this could be done with a GameEx plugin probably pretty easily. What exactly are you looking for it to do (ie spec).

I have a cabinet that I am thinking of installing a second monitor on top and having it display the marquees or possibly a combination of different artwork files or maybe have it alternate between marquees and flyers. Also when in a console emulator list maybe just display the logo for that console. Also when no artwork is available it would be nice to display a specified logo. Ideally the artwork would stay there after the game was launched.

Sort of along the same lines, I thought of possibly adding a third monitor that would be placed on the control panel that would display the control functions for each game and ideally it would stay displayed when the game was launched.

[bkenobi]

The 3rd monitor would be a bit difficult I think since you would have to add a 2nd or 3rd video card to your system. I've seen a few CP's that have an LED display with that kind of info. I'm sure there would be a pretty easy way to get that up and going, but a 3rd monitor could be tricky (but VERY cool potentially).

[Tom Speirs]

Not sure about the third monitor either, but a GameEx plugin could deffinitly do this.

Or maybe I could just make GameExtender "Better". What could I do to it to make it more usable?

[popcorrin]

The 3rd monitor would be a bit difficult I think since you would have to add a 2nd or 3rd video card to your system. I've seen a few CP's that have an LED display with that kind of info. I'm sure there would be a pretty easy way to get that up and going, but a 3rd monitor could be tricky (but VERY cool potentially).

You would be able to get by with 1 add in video card if you computer has onboard video and you add a card that supports dual displays which most of them do nowadays.

The cp's with the lcd displays is what got me thinking about using an actual monitor so that you could have cpviewer images displayed. I think it would be a pretty neat addition. I was envisioning it as the 3rd monitor on my own cabinet but it would still be a cool addition to regular cabinet that is currently only using 1 monitor, making the cpviewer monitor the 2nd monitor.

[popcorrin]

Not sure about the third monitor either, but a GameEx plugin could deffinitly do this.

Or maybe I could just make GameExtender "Better". What could I do to it to make it more usable?

I think it would be nice if gameextender was more customizable. More choices on what was displayed. Also, I wanted to mention that I was not able to get the gameextender viewer to work with vista. It works fine for me under XP.

For what I had envisioned maybe a plugin would be needed.

I have 2 cabinets that I planned on using dual displays with. On the first one I envisioned having gameex displayed on the primary monitor(lower monitor) and using the upper monitor(marquee) to display artwork(such as marquees, flyers, controls, or emulator logos, etc.; ideally the user could decide) while browsing gameex. When a game is launched the artwork image would stay on the upper monitor except for games or programs that use multiple displays. Then the upper monitor would be utilized by the corresponding game or program.

On my 2nd cabinet I thought about doing things a little different. The upper monitor(marquee) would be used to display gameex and the lower monitor would be used to display the artwork image while browsing in gameex. Then when a game was launched, the artwork image would be switched to the upper monitor and the game would be displayed on the lower monitor.

And like I said before, I thought it would be cool to have a 3rd monitor on the control panel to display the controls but it doesn't sound like that is too feasible.

[headkaze]

I think GameExtender would be better if it showed graphics in fullscreen and rotated through them all. It would be cool to have it include the avi snaps too. So GameExtender could be more of an attract mode display rather than just static images.

[bkenobi]

Since GameExtender is designed to work over a network (or the internet), do you think running the avi's would be a problem? I guess it could be set up to buffer or something (like YouTube, et. al.).

[Stub]

I just purchased a nice small lcd touchscreen, an I would like to use a front end on it and the games sent to another monitor.

Showing art would be great, But I was also thinking of having some admin buttons on the gamex screen, such as exit game, vol up and down, pause juke and next song. A button to invoke pause and the pic of the controls would be exciting also.