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jtalerico · Mar 12, 2006, 09:56 AM

I have recently got two 2005FPW's and I have it set in the Display section of Prefs to this dual monitor setup, but i was curious if there was a way to span one desktop through out both monitors. I am pushing these moniotrs with a Geforce 6800GT DDL. I am pretty sure that OS X cannot do it with out some sort of applicaiton, so with that said, is there anything out there to do what i want? Thanks guys!

icruise · Mar 12, 2006, 10:15 AM

Originally Posted by jtalerico

I have recently got two 2005FPW's and I have it set in the Display section of Prefs to this dual monitor setup, but i was curious if there was a way to span one desktop through out both monitors.

How do you have it set now, mirroring?

jtalerico · Mar 12, 2006, 10:19 AM

Mirrored does not get me what i am looking for. It just makes each monitor look the same. What i want is to have like One HUGE monitor kind of look/feel.

andreas_g4 · Mar 12, 2006, 10:48 AM

That's what he meant. Anyway, if it is not set to mirroring, you have it exactly the way you want. Unless you mean that the menu bar is shown on both screens, which is not possible.

jtalerico · Mar 12, 2006, 11:03 AM

Hmm, so i cannot expand the apple top bar, and my dock to the other side. No sort of program or utility to do it?

Not to bring up anything, but i have seen it done on PC's but I was curious to why i cannot do it on a mac.

southtdi · Mar 12, 2006, 08:26 PM

i'm kind of confused. Do you have the monitors mirroed or not? If you do can can certainly set them to be one desktop, that's not a problem. I run 2 Dell 2405's using the nVidia 6800 ultra (pretty much the same card you have just a tad faster) and run them as a enlarged desktop. You cannot, however span teh menu bar or the dock.

southtdi

jtalerico · Mar 12, 2006, 08:30 PM

Okay, so i cannot use these as one big monitor... Like i want halo to span both of them.

jmiddel · Mar 13, 2006, 12:46 AM

what southtdi is saying is that you can have one big monitor, just like I have. It is only the menu bar and the dock that will stay on one monitor. This is no big deal, in fact is is a plus! The second momitor, because it does not have either menu bar or dock, has more space. I use this featur all the time and love it.

jtalerico · Mar 13, 2006, 07:05 AM

okay, but once you open up a game, that free space goes black. Yet making it un-useable.

icruise · Mar 13, 2006, 09:33 AM

Can you really have Halo in Windows span two monitors? In any case I know of a few Windows games that support multiple monitor setups (mostly flight simulators and the like) but it's hardly a common feature. In other words, if it's possible, it's a feature of the game and not the OS.

The reason it took four or five replies to answer your question is that no one knew what you were asking. There are only two multi-display modes: mirroring and extended desktop. Your first post made it sound like you didn't know that the extended desktop mode was possible, hence my question about mirroring.

tooki · Mar 13, 2006, 11:14 AM

Originally Posted by jtalerico

okay, but once you open up a game, that free space goes black. Yet making it un-useable.

OK. To us Mac folks, who've had multiple-monitor setups for years before Windows got it, we have two modes: mirroring (where the displays show the exact same thing) and spanning (where the monitors combine to create one big desktop).

Here's the thing: because spanning mode is not a kludge on the Mac (as it once was on Windows), Mac OS doesn't "join" the displays into one big one and just tell applications that it has one big display. Instead, the OS knows what displays you have (and you arrange them how you want), and tells applications "this user has X number of displays, in the following arrangement". It is up to the application to decide how to use them, if the application uses full-screen modes.

Case in point: by 1996 we had a flight simulator (F/A-18 Hornet, maybe?) that could use three displays for a wraparound cockpit.

tooki