extended screen mode(example pictures)

[James]

well.......
as Jim said b4,the 3D background has the width of doubled current screen........
see below:


if I disable the camera panning mode.....
Am I able to extend the screen to another screen horizontaly in nView?

like this:


notice that the Golden Butterfly in the middle, it'll swim from one screen to another.....if I put my two LCD together.....it'll looks great....


I'm sorry I use the chinese interface.....
I could switch it to English interface but I'm so lazy to do that........as long as my main point shows, hope u guys won't mind......

[Jim Sachs]

The ultimate plan is to have the double-wide background able to spread across dual monitors. At the moment, I have no idea how to do it (or even get the picture to show up on the Preview screen in DX6).

[Shinsa]

Correct me if I'm wrong,

But didn't multi monitor support get dropped in Win XP?

[James]

Jim...it's sad to hear that......
well....maybe u can just set the wdith of SSA fixed....
coz if my desktop is 1024*768...my TV only support 800*600.....the driver will automatically extend the rest of the scrren to TV.....

Shinsa
well........I'm not sure about it
but my nVidia drver has this feature support and it's working well...I can clone or extend my desktop to my 24" TV with no problem....

I think it's the driver that matters.....nothing to do with WinXP.....
also Correct me if I'm wrong too....

[Innovan]

Multimonitor support was always scheduled for XP Professional. Allegedly MS changed their minds and let it stay in XP Home as well. (Probably was too much trouble to disable)

Previously you'd have to place in two different video driver cards to drive two monitors. I've seen demos of the new GeForce Ti 4600 and their engineers told me also about using dual monitors during development, I didn't think to ask them if they had to use two video cards still.

I don't belive Jim you have to do anything on your end except enable people to scale the window edge wider until it extends over two monitors. Or more likely just double the X. So if they're at 1280x1024, to do doublescreen you'd open a 2560x1024 window and the OS takes care of which pixel goes to which screen for you.

Very popular with graphics editing folk. Drag and size the output screen to one monitor, and drag all the control and editing pop-ups to another, saving you the trouble of flipping screens to see things.

[James]

I don't belive Jim you have to do anything on your end except enable people to scale the window edge wider until it extends over two monitors. Or more likely just double the X. So if they're at 1280x1024, to do doublescreen you'd open a 2560x1024 window and the OS takes care of which pixel goes to which screen for you.

indeed.......thats' why I said just set the wdith of SSA fixed
Jim, is that possible?
lock the camera panning and with fixed width so that the dirver can extend the rest part of the SSA to other screen??

[Mage Joe]

That's exactly how my Matrox G450 dual head setup works:
it just looks like a single screen twice as wide as normal
(i.e., 2048x768 for example). Display card does all the work
so the programs don't need to do anything special.

I'm running the current "widescreen" version of SS that way
(albeit a bit stretched since it's not actually 2x width). I'd be
very happy with an option to simply 2x the width at a given
resolution without doing anything else.

[James]

That's exactly how my Matrox G450 dual head setup works:
it just looks like a single screen twice as wide as normal
(i.e., 2048x768 for example). Display card does all the work
so the programs don't need to do anything special.

well.Yes.....butt the thing is
the driver is actually stretching the 1024 to 2048.....
the image has distorted.....

so Mage Joe......does ur SSA has a little distorted while doing this?
as u said since it's not actually 2x width for the wildscreen version....

I'm running the current "widescreen" version of SS

well......how come u have "current" wildscreen version?
is it v1.1.2? I don't think so......coz Jim just said it's not yet released......
where can I get the .99L wildescreen version?
coz I wanan test it on my GeForce driver

and I hope that when Jim's 3D version comes out......the image won't distorted......since Jim said b4 that its width will be 2x for current one
right Jim?

[FishyBusiness]

The 'current' widescreen version is v.99K You can get a copy of that by emailing serenescreen with your name, key code, email address, and *maybe* the last four digits of the credit card that was used to purchase the aquarium.

[Jim Sachs]

But please don't do that right now. We're still several days behind in dealing with emails.

[LittleScooby]

I think it would be pretty nice to see a dual monitor version of Aquarium (by far the best screen saver ever written).

It seems like more and more people are setting up dual monitors these days.

I recently purchased a GF4 which has built in dual monitor support and I am currently looking at a second monitor to add to it after successfully setting up a dual display at work (using 2 vid cards). I've found that once you have tried dual monitors for work or play, you will not want to go back to a boring, less productive single display setup.

As for Aquarium having to be written for dual monitors, I don't quite understand why that is needed. With every program I have tried at work, just stretching an application to the second window seems to work just fine.

Here is a link to the best multi-monitor resource site on the web:

http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/

Oh, and here are my dream monitors:

http://www.massmultiples.com/
http://www.9xmedia.com/
http://www.panoramtech.com/products/pv230.html

I wish someone could buy one for me at xmas but I doubt anyone will.

Anyway, keep up the great work on Aquarium!

[Innovan]

They have a whole programming tips section.
http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon...d_graphics.asp

Downside:
OpenGL supports only a very small number of 3D cards across multi-monitors. Direct3D seems better supported. DirectX 8 of course preferred. :-P

Upside: Heck, I'd just been thinking of "dual head" monitor cards. (A single 3D video card that supports two monitors) The people at this site are into three and four monitors at once, doing long extended landscape views. To my eye though it looks ugly if the monitors aren't matched models.

The real reason to appeal to the high end: Free publicity. I'd say draw a line in the sand like "Only supporting two monitors on XP using dual head video cards" so high end freaks can run with it. Multi-monitor types are leading edge technology types anyways, this will just drop support headaches with scavengers who try to cobble together something just to see if they can. (And they'll always be able to run it single monitor mode.)

[Innovan]

In response to an email, I'm just guessing that "dual head" video cards will be the easiest to support for multi-monitor combinations since all the calcs for both monitor displays are done by one GPU. ("Graphic Central Processor" instead of a CPU)

The real problem is when you have two different 3D video cards, each calculating at different rates thousands of polygons each to display the same scene from two different windows. Best case you get a lagged scene between two monitors. I think Jim shouldn't waste his time in driverland, but if he's got a few betatesters with dual headed video cards that he can work well with it may be a low effort invested for a pretty cool pay-off.

(Innovan pictures HGTV installing TWO flatscreens over a fireplace, really showing off Serenescreen!)

What would be a real pain in the arse would be to have a "gap at the seams". You have two monitors side by side. You don't like that a fish "stretches" across the four inch gap between monitor frames, and would like the screensaver to have a four inch non-display zone between the two displays, so instead the fish glide off one screen, into the four inch dead zone, then onto the next screen. A six inch fish scales correctly with one inch head displayed left monitor, one inch end-tail displayed right monitor, and four inches non-displayed in the dead zone in the frames between the displays.

Ugh. *That* is not worth the programming effort. Let MS solve that one, please.

[schnakker]

hello,

i hope thats the right place to talk abot my problems.
i use a motrox g450 - dual monitor and win2k sp2, directx 8.1 and the newest matrox driver and have two problems.

the tirst one is i have always trouble if i use the aquarium screen saver with a resolution 2304*864 or higher - a lower resolution works fine. every time "dr. watson" is coming. is there a
problem in your software? whats wrong?
sorry but upload is out of work (my zipfile has 48kb)... *g* so i've paste "dr. watson.log" at the end of this message.

the second one because i use a dual monitor system the fishes and so on are really strechted - how can i activate the wide screen function?

thanks.
san.


this is what dr. watson say:


Microsoft (R) Windows 2000 (R) Version 5.00 DrWtsn32
Copyright (C) 1985-1999 Microsoft Corp. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.



Anwendungsausnahme aufgetreten:
Anwendung: (pid=1628)
Wann: 20.03.2002 @ 16:52:34.766
Ausnahmenummer: c0000005 (Zugriffsverletzung)

*----> Systeminformationen <----*
Prozessoranzahl: 1
Prozessortyp: x86 Family 6 Model 8 Stepping 10
Windows 2000-Version: 5.0
Aktuelles Build: 2195
Service Pack: 2
Aktueller Typ: Uniprocessor Free

*----> Taskliste <----*
0 Idle.exe
8 System.exe
140 SMSS.exe
164 CSRSS.exe
184 WINLOGON.exe
212 SERVICES.exe
224 LSASS.exe
400 svchost.exe
428 spoolsv.exe
504 svchost.exe
528 mgabg.exe
540 ntc77srv.exe
608 regsvc.exe
640 mstask.exe
744 SWNETSUP.exe
756 SWEEPSRV.SYS.exe
768 SWUPDATE.exe
784 TraceServer.exe
820 WinMgmt.exe
1140 explorer.exe
1244 internat.exe
1072 ICMON.exe
1044 hardcopy.exe
1228 iTouch.exe
1112 nlnotes.exe
1248 KbdTray.exe
1040 naldaemn.exe
620 nhldaemn.exe
812 taskmgr.exe
1048 netscp6.exe
196 pdesk.exe
488 rundll32.exe
1628 Aquarium.scr.exe
808 DRWTSN32.exe
0 _Total.exe

(00400000 - 0052C000)
(77880000 - 77901000)
(773E0000 - 773F3000)
(78000000 - 78046000)
(77E70000 - 77F32000)
(77E00000 - 77E64000)
(77F40000 - 77F7C000)
(77DA0000 - 77DFC000)
(77D30000 - 77DA0000)
(77540000 - 77571000)
(51080000 - 510D4000)
(77A40000 - 77B36000)
(77810000 - 77817000)
(75940000 - 75946000)
(51000000 - 51044000)
(72810000 - 72816000)
(72BA0000 - 72BB2000)
(77580000 - 777C8000)
(70BD0000 - 70C34000)
(71780000 - 7180A000)
(10000000 - 10024000)
(00970000 - 009A0000)
(009B0000 - 009DF000)
(00A10000 - 00A1E000)
(72D90000 - 72E03000)

Statusabbild für Threadkennung 0x5bc

eax=00955b00 ebx=0042905b ecx=00000000 edx=00000001 esi=001285a8 edi=77e0497a
eip=0040d1f4 esp=00128024 ebp=00000000 iopl=0 nv up ei pl zr na po nc
cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=0038 gs=0000 efl=00000246


Funktion:
0040d1cf 33c0 xor eax,eax
0040d1d1 5e pop esi
0040d1d2 83c428 add esp,0x28
0040d1d5 c20800 ret 0x8
0040d1d8 684c8e4200 push 0x428e4c
0040d1dd 6878944200 push 0x429478
0040d1e2 e8f946ffff call 004018e0
0040d1e7 a14c8e4200 mov eax,[00428e4c] ds:00428e4c=00955b00
0040d1ec 6a01 push 0x1
0040d1ee 8b8844010000 mov ecx,[eax+0x144] ds:00955c44=00000000
FEHLER ->0040d1f4 8b510c mov edx,[ecx+0xc] ds:00b5d5d2=????????
0040d1f7 891548954200 mov [00429548],edx ds:00429548=00000000
0040d1fd 8b8044010000 mov eax,[eax+0x144] ds:00955c44=00000000
0040d203 8b4808 mov ecx,[eax+0x8] ds:014b30d2=????????
0040d206 890d505f4200 mov [00425f50],ecx ds:00425f50=00000000
0040d20c e84d560000 call 0041285e
0040d211 83c40c add esp,0xc
0040d214 85c0 test eax,eax
0040d216 7409 jz 00415d21
0040d218 8bc8 mov ecx,eax
0040d21a e861dbffff call 0040ad80
0040d21f eb02 jmp 00410523

*----> Stack Back Trace <----*

FramePtr ReturnAd Param#1 Param#2 Param#3 Param#4 Function Name
00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 !

*----> Raw Stack Dump <----*
00128024 01 00 00 00 78 94 42 00 - 4c 8e 42 00 57 36 13 00 ....x.B.L.B.W6..
00128034 67 98 e0 77 0b 00 00 00 - 30 d4 40 00 00 00 00 00 g..w....0.@.....
00128044 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 - 15 03 63 00 11 00 01 00 ......@...c.....
00128054 11 00 90 01 00 00 00 00 - 30 25 42 00 cd 25 41 00 ........0%B..%A.
00128064 00 00 40 00 57 36 13 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 ..@.W6........@.
00128074 c0 ff 12 00 00 f0 fd 7f - 00 00 00 5b 00 00 00 00 ...........[....
00128084 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00128094 61 83 32 0d 6e 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 a.2.n...........
001280a4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
001280b4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
001280c4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
001280d4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 4d 50 33 5f 54 45 43 48 ........MP3_TECH
001280e4 4e 4f 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 NO..............
001280f4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00128104 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00128114 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00128124 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00128134 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00128144 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00128154 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................

[feldon34]

is there a problem in your software? whats wrong?

The Aquarium does not support Dual Monitors.

sorry but upload is out of work (my zipfile has 48kb)...

You cannot attach images/files at this time.

the second one because i use a dual monitor system the fishes and so on are really strechted

The Aquarium does not support Dual Monitors.

how can i activate the wide screen function?

The widescreen is a separate version of the software 1.1.3WS and it is not available yet.

[Jim Sachs]

Don't forget that the Aquarium does not yet support dual monitors. There is a widescreen version, but it is only 16:9 ratio (1280x768), not 2.6:1 as you are looking for.

As far as having trouble with that enormous resolution, I don't know how much video ram your card has, but it's likely that it is running out.

[patscarr]

schnakker

i have always trouble if i use the aquarium screen saver with a resolution 2304*864 or higher - a lower resolution works fine

You've answered your own question.

[James]

Yes!
The Aquarium does not support Dual Monitors as Morgan said..
I've try to stretching the beta wildscreen version into dual monitor but failed.....
u can see my result of testing here
https://www.feldoncentral.com/forums...=&threadid=713

by the way Morgan
do u need more info about my test reault
such as specifications of my computer and other driver's version number?
if u need it I'll email u with my complete report about this dual monitor tetsing
and so far I didn't find any problem of this beta version.....

[schnakker]

Jim Sachs

I don't know how much video ram your card has, but it's likely that it is running out.

hello jim, i've a matrox video card with 16mb ram - is that too low for a resolution 2304*864 and higher (16 bit and 32 bit)...?


thanks.

[Jim Sachs]

2304 pixels * 864 pixels * 2 bytes per pixel * 3 buffers = 11943936 bytes (almost 12 megs) just to display the screen in 16-bit. 32-bit would nearly double that (the Z-buffer remains at 16-bit). Add to this all the fish and background textures, and you can see why a 16-meg card would be gasping.