It's actually easier that I thought, although you really need a stronger video card to drive two screens properly. More on that latter.
You start by setting up Windows for multiple monitor support and for extended desktop, where Windows treats the two monitors like one extended screen. Then you launch FSX and start a mission or free-flight or whatever normally. Once in the simulator, you activate the menu, go the view menu, select new view and then virtual cockpit. That opens a small window, sort of like a picture-in-picture on the main monitor, which you then drag to the second monitor and resize to fill the screen. Finally, you adjust the view angle on each screen so they line up correctly or as close as you can get them.
Here's a photo of the results:
A laptop with widescreen sits a good bit lower than a standard monitor on a stand, so I had to put a phone book under the laptop to compensate. The effect is still not perfect, but you clearly get a better view than with a single screen. Imagine three screens, and the peripheral vision effect you get from that!
As I mentioned earlier, my laptop's video capabilities were not made for gaming, so forcing it to output twice as many pixels resulted in a noticeable reduction in frame rate, to the point that it made flying more difficult. I still managed to take off, circle around a bit and land without crashing, but the landing was not pretty. The lag between control inputs and the screen updates was hard to adjust to so there was a lot of over-correction on the approach.
To make this work with acceptable frame rates I'd need to reduce the graphics quality a good bit. Then the question becomes whether that's worth the extra screen real estate you gain from this setup. With a desktop system and a gaming video card, you probably wouldn't have to make the trade-off.
The other thing I noticed, and perhaps there's a work around, is that only one screen is "active" at any given time, and only that screen pans when you change your point of view (looking left or right for example). Thus, any effort to look around breaks the illusion that you're looking at one really wide screen. Maybe there's a way to lock the screens so they pan together, but I've not figured that out yet.
More testing to follow...
Is there a limit to how many monitors you can hook up (beyond, obviously, the resources of the computer)? I think you mentioned that some people hook up 4 monitors, for left, right, and forward view, and then a 4th for just the control panel.
ReplyDeleteFSX does not place a limit that I know of. I've seen set-ups with a dozen monitors or more, but to get that they're actually running multiple PC's networked with a software that allows FSX to run across multiple platforms.
ReplyDeleteOn a single PC, with a typical gaming video card, you can run two monitors because the cards have two video-outs. To run four monitors, you put two video cards in the computer.
And another solution that I just remembered is the Matrox TripleHead system. It's an external box that connects to a single video-out on the PC and then to three monitors. It tricks the video card into thinking you've got one really wide monitor and then handles the 3-way split of the larger image. One advantage would be that the three monitors would really act like one big monitor for panning the view around. On the other hand, you'd better have a really good video card to drive that many pixels.
ReplyDeleteWith 12 monitors, you could have one showing the in-flight movie!
ReplyDeleteShades of those scenes in movies where movie-hackers seem to have a whole wall of monitors, each displaying arcane information (apparently movie hackers don't use Windows).
Some people actually use touch screen monitors to display the instruments and controls so they can touch the screen to push a button.
ReplyDeleteOf course, those people probably don't have very good tans, or muscle tone...
8-way video card!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/12/8-way-video-card.html