First post, by chinny22
- Rank
- l33t++
This has been on my to do list since I first read about it back in the 90's!
Just before Christmas I saved these 3 17" screens from work and I knew the time had come 😀
And I thought it was so cool I have to film it
https://youtu.be/HSR7b3fHRnQ
(ignore the 2 desktop 486's under the screens, they kept getting out of sync with the P3's)
Left PC, P3 1Ghz beige PC under the table
Dell makes surprisingly good retro PC's
Middle PC, P4 with red fans on top of the table
P4P800 End of Win98 Support Build
Right PC, Duel P3 600 with blue fans under the table
Asus P2B-DS Build
As the P4 doesn't have any decent dos sound, the Roland is attached to the AWE64 on the Duel P3
For the youtube Video I was actually playing off a second screen on the far left attached to the P4's geforce 6800, taking advantage of how in dos is just duplicates the image on both screens,
The benefit of having a PC dedicated per screen is you can customise the screen layout somewhat, which I tried to show in the video.
Only the middle PC can move doom guy but each PC still has full local control of everything else like its screen size, so you can have the status bar on all 3 screens or pick and choose where you want it.
Press tab on the left PC will keep the map up on that screen and you can continue playing on the other 2.
This got me thinking If you setup a 4th PC you could in theory use that as a dedicated map screen. I tested assigning 2 left computers and nothing for the right and it ran fine, It doesn't look like the game checks for that.
The command line is:
Doom -net 3 -left
Doom -net 3
Doom -net 3 -right
I'm betting if you replaced the 3 with a 4 to make a 4 player game and simply made the 4th a drone PC with the -left command, it would work just fine.
But rest of the family want the room back.
This is the 1st time I've played any game with 3 screens and it definitely helps, I would recommend it. E1M1 and 2 doesn't make much difference but when the levels start getting bigger areas you see monsters you would normally walk past.
The good thing is the drone PC's requirements are pretty low, can boot to dos and the network card has a DOS ODI driver (even modern cards usually do)
You don't have to worry about sound, CD, Mouse drivers or anything else.
The catch is Doom itself.
after v1.1 the updated networking broke this feature. You can find early shareware versions here
http://toogam.com/software/archive/games/shar … om/doomshar.htm