Dual monitors and certain games locking the mouse...

T

thisismyusername

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Jul 19, 2005
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Hello,

I recently hooked up an old monitor in my second port, but I'm having issues in certain games when running in dual monitor mode.

Most directX games have their own mouse cursor so to speak, thus when I move my mouse to the edge of the game nothing happens. It's as if I'm not running 2 monitors.

I googled around and couldn't find anything to over-ride this, hoping you guys can help...

Basically I'm asking for a program that'll tell these games to relax and let the mouse go over to the second screen when I move it past the edge of my primary monitor.

I went as far as programming something real quick in VB (yes forgive me) that moved my mouse cursor to the second monitor when hitting a specific hot key. This works great, but doesn't work when inside a game (directX programming is a bit over my head, but I wouldn't be objected to a vb6 example if no program already exists).

Thanks.

Btw I'm aware that I can alt-tab out of the game and then the dual monitor setup works flawlessly, but if I'm going to alt-tab out, what's the point in running dual monitors heh.
 
I run dual monitors and wonder why you'd want this feature?? You'd be constantly clicking on the other monitor accidentally and minimizing out of your game. It's happened to me before. I had a problem with a few games that wouldn't lock the mouse to one monitor while playing the game. The only way around it was to disable the second monitor while I played that game. It sucked.
 
A somewhat amusing thing I found while googling was a program that does lock the mouse to the primary monitor (so you don't have to disable the 2nd monitor). It's the exact opposite of what I want, I haven't tried it but here's a link:

http://www.dr-hoiby.com/MouseJail/index.php

I'd like to be able to click out of the game without alt-tabbing because the game isn't very demanding input wise. When it's my "turn", I use the mouse to make various adjustments and keyboard for a few things. The game doesn't register my inputs until I specifically press a button (it's a turn based game, so whatever I do prior to hitting that magical button doesn't matter according to the game).

So yes, I'd like to be able to type in IRC inbetween turns or browse around/etc, without having to alt tab (takes a while, it's annoying, and each player has a specific amount of time to do their action -- if I were to alt-tab and not check back constantly I'd run the risk of losing my turn).
 
S1nF1xx said:
I run dual monitors and wonder why you'd want this feature?? You'd be constantly clicking on the other monitor accidentally and minimizing out of your game. It's happened to me before. I had a problem with a few games that wouldn't lock the mouse to one monitor while playing the game. The only way around it was to disable the second monitor while I played that game. It sucked.
Click to expand...

Yep, I don't think this will work the way you want it to. I'm almost positive that as soon as you click on IRC to type something, it'll minimize the game.

The reason why that program you found is the opposite of want you want is because it's extremely annoying to have a cursor go to a second monitor in game... It messes up the game play, especially in something 3D.
 
Run the game in windowed mode. Other than that, there's probaby no such program. The fact is what you want to do is exactly the opposite of what anyone else wants, you're need is rather weird really, but running the game in window mode should do it for you. Of course, lets hope your game supports that easily.
 
Yep, in window mode it's fine. As long as the game doesn't have focus I can move over to the second monitor.

The game requires a great deal of hand-eye coordination, which is why I wanted to avoid window mode. I won't bother going into huge detail, but it's a golf game. There's this bar that moves across the bottom of your screen, and if you don't hit a "perfect" shot, then certain shots do not work and you miss badly.

Sadly the game's UI is scaled with your screen resolution. The higher resolution you use, the smaller this little bar at the bottom becomes. Anything higher than 640x480 is lot more difficult to hit. Also in window mode, for some reason the game condenses the UI in such a way that is even worse than running it in a window that matches your desktop resolution.

I did end up tricking it with a small program I wrote. Basically when I hit a specific hotkey, it would set focus to a program on the other monitor, but an unexpected side effect sprung up. When the game loses focus in full screen it automatically minimizes itself (even if the program is on the 2nd monitor). I don't think I would be able to get around that, unless the developers of the game added some type of special dual monitor support I guess.

Thanks anyways, and yes I know it's weird. :)

I wouldn't want this option in any game that requires you to move the mouse often (like a FPS), it would be horrible.
 
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