Dual Monitors
 

I recently discovered the dual monitor ability of my laptop running Windows XP. I'm curious if there is any way to make use of that feature with Real Flight. I've done some searching and didn't find anything, so it's doubtful. I have G2, and I noticed something about split screen with G3. It would be nice to run one view on a second monitor while you're flying on the main screen. Any chance of this with G2?

Thanks,
Paul

RE: Dual Monitors
 

Guys have looked for that for years with the racing sims.

Some of the sims let you push a button to look out the car's left side and another button to look out the right side. The guys wanted to run 3 monitors with the side views always up on the side monitors. But unless the software knows to always send 3 views consecutively, and ignore the buttons' positions, it wasn't going to work.

To get different views, the software has to produce them. Most software only produces the one view you are using at that moment in order to churn the fewest cycles. Some of the "view" you see is created by the application's mainline code that passes that off to the video card. So if you want to see two views at once, the application would need modification to work the code that creates one of the views and also work the code that creates the other view. I'd guess that functionality isn't designed into most flying sims or it'd be advertised like crazy.

RE: Dual Monitors
 

BTW, there was a rumor years ago about one of the first flying game sims. Think it was Fighting Falcon.

The word was that a military school had used an Amiga and then hacked the app's code. The Amiga was the first multi-tasker available. (It was multi-tasking at the same time MS was explaining to everyone why multi-tasking was an impossibility for pc's) These schoolboys supposedly had three or four monitors showing consecutively.

The explanantion was that they'd hacked the code so the path that worked up the current view was paralleled. They supposedly wrote a patch that either got 3-4 loops through the video code going, or kicked off alternate programs that were just the video path.

With the capability of the Amiga back then compared to the pc's of that day, a lot of us believed that it was possible.

RE: Dual Monitors
 

Thanks for info, darock. You obviously know what you're talking about. I thought it would be a long shot. My son said something recently about a new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator having multi-screen capability. He saw it at Oshkosh a month or so ago. I'll have to check it out on the MS web site.

Thanks again,
Paul

RE: Dual Monitors
 

Well, I found out the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 supports multiple screens (see link below). That's the version my son has. I might try to install it on my laptap, which I know can drive two monitors at once, and see how well it works. I would assume that the latest version, Flight Simulator X, has the same capability, but I didn't see anything about it on the "official" site. In fact, the site seems to be a huge Flash presentation and impossible to search.

Paul

http://www.microsoft.com/games/fligh...ltimonitor.asp