Before you all go and flame me I'm going to openly admit I do not know jack**** about dual monitor setups, and do not claim to, so yes, my questions will be elementary for some of you. Keep the wise *** cracks to yourself.



I do alot of gaming involving older games, of which all do not support widescreen resolutions. For some unknown reason, the monitor/video card setup I have, does NOT run these games well at all in their native resolutions, nor a "fixed" widescreen version, even with the "black bars". The games will either crash immediately, or experience such high frame rate they are completely undesirable to play.

For this reason I believe it is worth looking into a dual monitor setup, such as being able to slide your mouse pointer over to the other monitor. I do not know the technical term for this type of setup, but would it be possible somehow for the older games to run on a 17" monitor displayed to the right or left of my main 22" monitor? The idea would be to run all older games on the smaller monitor and use the main screen for everything else, without having to unplug each one for each use.

Sorry for my lack of knowledge in this area, but I know there are several of you who run this type of setup and have some knowledge in the field.

jeez what a disclaimer

I can't help you with setting that up, but it probably isn't the resolution or monitor that's making the game crash.

You're not giving us much information, What's your computer specs? Did they work before on this computer? Did you change anything recently and then they stopped working? How old are the games? It's most likely not the monitor or screen resolution since LCD screens usually have a scaling function for resolutions that aren't native for the monitor. (I'm assuming it's LCD or Plasma since you mentioned it being widescreen)

Some games are just not playable with newer computers, especially games that used CPU cycles as a basis for timing. (The Sim games are notorious for this, sim copter and streets of sim city come to mind. DOS games are also difficult to get working on newer computers)

Also, some older games hate dual monitor setups and will need the second monitor disabled to run properly anyway.

Dual monitors is not the solution for your situation. Your widescreen LCD should be able to run in 4:3 resolutions just fine, with stretching. This would be transparent to any game.

Also, you cannot force games to open on a specific monitor without them being in windowed mode. Fullscreen games will ALWAYs open on the "primary" monitor.

My computer specs are:
1.7 ghz amd
1 gig ddr ram
nvidia 7600 gt 256mb
hp w2207 22" monitor
Windows XP pro 32 bit

The setup ran perfectly on my old crt with every old game I played. As soon as I switched to the lcd, every old game played like absolute crap no matter what resolution or aspect ratio I used. I am 100% sure it is the monitor.

Monitors don't work that way, it's not processing any information so it can't be the cause. it can make the video card stretch the games video output, that could cause lag. Have you tried opening up the Nvidia control panel and telling it not to scale?

That's not true. Some games let you choose what video adapter to use. If you select the adapter corresponding to your secondary monitor, it'll output to that monitor.

Yes. Games still run like absolute ****. I am going to hook a CRT up to it this week and see if I run into the same problems or if things run smoothly. I never encountered any of these issues until the monitor swap.

It's not the monitor, it's almost assuredly the games or the fact that you're running it at a higher resolution. Check to see if your settings got switched to where AA and AF are on for some reason.

Also, what games? We still need more information.

PPS, that video card is bollocks for anything made after 2004 or so.

Yeah I don't run anything over 2004 anyway.


When I say literally any game, I mean literally any game not meant for widescreen.

Hell even JK gave me godawful framerate on the new monitor.


AA and AF? I'm assuming AA means anti aliasing but AF?

Ansi filter.

but no.

Anisotropic Filtering. I'm not sure what it means but I group it in my mind with AA as a "screenshot enhancement" and turn it off when dealing with moving images. The bigger the resolution you run in the less you need it.

Then there might be something else going on. JK supports widescreen resolutions.

It's a type of texture filtering to get rid of "Blurries".

So AA turns the jaggies to blurries and AF turns the blurries back to jaggies?

Everything is set to "global" or application based, so AA and AF technically are not on.

No, AA (FSAA) renders the image at a resolution higher then what you display (2x 1680x1050 renders it at 3360x2100) and then downsizes it back. AF does some complex things to prevent textures from getting blured at certain angles and distances.

Suprisingly I just tried it with those settings maximized and it ran better then with none of it on at all. It was still choppy at times, but definitely much smoother then before.

Tried what? What game?