Using 1 Gaming Computer For 2 People? 424
True Vox writes "My fiance and I have recently taken interest in City of Heroes (she's currently got a character on my account). She's got a cute little netbook, but nothing nearly powerful enough for a 5-year-old MMORPG, let alone if we take interest in Champions Online! I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase. Has anyone had any experience using one computer to control two monitors with two sets of input devices (e.g. two keyboards and two mice, or one keyboard, one mouse, and a 360 gamepad, perhaps)? I have seen one solution that might work, but not much information from users that I can find. In short, does anyone have any experience with setups like this?"
Re:RDP (Score:5, Interesting)
A tip for both you and the submitter: fiance is the groom, fiancee is the bride.
There's also an accent on the first e, but I'm not going to attempt it because Slashdot eats my unicode for breakfast.
Fun with Xorg + Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Multiseat (Score:5, Interesting)
And Windows? Hah. You can't even remote desktop to a Windows PC without kicking off the user at the console.
For goodness sake, just buy her a REAL MACHINE. (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife went through a passing phase a while back ago, so I got her a quad-core P4 w/4gb/500Mb, Radeon 1950 x 2 in crossfire, 41" monitor, Wireless mouse, Keyboard, joysticks, gamepads. Basically everything I wanted in a game machine, while I only had a small netbook (although I could play Farcry on my netbook so it wasn't that bad...)
I thought it was a GREAT idea... She would get tired of it and I get a new gaming machine that she would never let me buy.
Unfortunately, she loved it so much she kept it and I didn't get to "inherit" it all after the passing phase.
But at least she didn't give me any grief over getting (more recently) a much better spec machine, because it cost me a lot less than hers did at the time.
GrpA
Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box. (Score:5, Interesting)
Craigslist any 2+ ghz P4 1gb system for ~$100 and you should be able to play City of Heroes since that is the recommended system requirements [ign.com]. Slap in a $100 Radeon 4770 [techspot.com] (slashdot's new favorite [slashdot.org] card [slashdot.org]) and her system will probably run better than yours.... or you can continue to waste our time. Your choice, choose wisely.
Use a rental (Score:2, Interesting)
As a bonus, I guess your 'partner' could use it to 'play games' while in bed.
A relationship obviously not built on respect (Score:2, Interesting)
"she has a cute little notebook.... what amounts to a passing phase."
Are this condescending to your fiance directly, or just when she is not around?
I bought my g/f a PC (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
No. If they are trying to do something stupid or pointless the deserve to be told so. Also people should read this [catb.org] before asking questions.
Specifically this poster should have read this [catb.org] and done number 5.
Champions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A relationship obviously not built on respect (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:For goodness sake, just buy her a REAL MACHINE. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, not always. It's usually worse.
Most wives seem to put computer hardware into the same bucket as sports cars, motorbikes, and substances (beer or otherwise) -- things that men often want, but never really need. Therefore, buying something new (a mouse, a motherboard, a DVD burner, another terabyte of disk or few gigs of RAM) is often a fight.
There are exceptions, but those are exceptional.
Like this:
First, my wife bought herself a nice dual-core machine. A little under a year later, she asks me to pick something out for myself...and I managed to find a nice quad-core SLI machine for about what she paid for hers. She said OK.
Re:Hardware probably isnt the real problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yea, this guy's right. Even if you could run CoH in multiple instances concurrently (which shouldn't be hard, it's not THAT resource intensive for an MMO, though it uses a bit more than WoW to look good), you can't easily make Windows understand how to use 2 sets of keyboards and mice concurrently.
Sure, the keyboard you could likely get past by having 2 and using completely different keys for each instance, but especially in CoH, the 1-8 keys, control key, and space bar are REALLY important... The mouse however is the real issue. Connect multiple mice and you do not get mutliple cursors. Windows was not designed for multiple concurrent user access. (virtually no OS is except via command shell).
Even if it could be done, you're likely talking about adding a much more powerful GPU to your machine, a bunch of RAM, and likey you might also need to considder a ram disk to keep load lag to a minimum (CoH is texture heavy). The cost to upgrade your machine likely exceeds the cost of a cheap gaming rig.
My wife's 3.5 year old gateway notebook (AMD64, 1GB, ATI x600) Ran COH pretty well... she played it for years, and had spare resources to run custom background utilities and a voice chat app. She ran the game on basically medium requirements. A $300 el-cheapo PC combo from BestBuy (there are FEW that have PCIe slots, but MAKE SURE YOU CHECK!) and a $79 graphics car will bet the pants off her laptop config, likely for less than upgrading your rig to pull it off...
Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box. (Score:3, Interesting)
PSU is cheap enough that it's worth it to me to spend a little bit extra to get a PSU which is quiet. This means it has a large diameter fan, and has plenty of power. Along those same lines, I like to get humongous CPU coolers with as much copper as possible so I can run without a CPU fan.
Re:Multiseat (Score:3, Interesting)
Erm multiseat has been around and will always be around due to the xorg architecture. It has *always* been possible. There are basically 2 solutions:
*"the old way" setup xorg.conf with two xservers with seperate gfx card (it may be possible to do it on one gfx card but there will probably be driver/performance problems), keyboard & mouse. Additionally he can use a simple script to switch over xorg configurations and use the same setup as a dual monitor system. From a technical standpoint this is the way to go, 2 users, 2 accounts, 2 desktops.
*"the new way" much more complicated and im not entirely sure how it would work, but also much more powerful and dynamic, use mpx and strange keyboard binding to use both mice and both keyboards on a single xserver (preferably powered by two gfx cards anyway). This is the new shiny way to go, technically inferior but more userfriendly once setup.
This what you had in mind? (Score:2, Interesting)
This company [userful.com] offers software that allows you to run multiple sessions off of one computer, with separate monitors and inputs.
Their software is open source, and the larger part of their customer base are in developing nations, allowing institutions to provide more terminals at lower cost (Only needing to purchase one machine to serve, for example, 5 or more people.)