CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Important Information These are community forums and not official technical support. If you need official support: Contact Us

CrossOver Linux
Discussion about CrossOver Linux

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Back to Threads Reply to Thread

Multi-head/xinerama support

I run CXPro and CXGames on Fedora with 2 1600x1200 flatpanels side-by-side using Nvidia's TwiNView feature (which internally is just Xinerama). It would be nice if CX handled full-screen games more like Windows where normally they only see one monitor and confine themselves entirely to that monitor. It's a bit distracting to run games and have them split across the displays, which is what happens right now. I don't even care about "real" multi-head support, I'd be more than thrilled if games would just stick to one monitor 😊

This is on our todo list, although I must admit that it is rather low priority since we got very few requests for that.

The problem is that our Direct3D implementation just sees the two monitors as one big monitor. In order to fix this we have to report two monitors, so the game can set them up individually. That implicitly means "real" multihead support where each monitor has its own swapchain and front and back buffer and is renderable separately.

I'll just chirp this topic - this is annoying, and good to see it's on the todo list. Mind you, it's not just apps that are affected...ie; I was fooling with bottle management in cxgames (linux) today, and even it will pop one window here...and another over there...but I'm already nuts, so it doesn't really bother me. For all I've read, this seems to be as much to do with the nvidia driver's handling of xinerama (as opposed to X's nv driver), however I can tell you -some- native (linux) apps have it worked out. Typically, my second monitor is used for PVR output (mythtv), and FWIW the mythtv code -can- differentiate between xinerama screen 0 & screen 1, allowing the user to choose the output screen. With this in mind, I'm sure this issue will be resolved some day...however, I'm fairly sure other things do (and should) receive priority. For now, I know my root password, I know where my xorg.confs are, and I just use a symlink pointing xorg.conf to which setup I choose to use at the time - single head or twinview, restart X...no big deal. Oh, and if you want to laugh about distraction, the first screen here is 1680x1050, the 2nd 1024x768, but (as said before) things will see the total size of 2704x1050 and so when it gets wrong, it gets REALLY wrong here (-;

I'll throw in my request to get this fixed. I've been running on 6.2 for a while now, and finally got a new machine - loaded it with ubuntu 8.10 and installed the new version. I'm using the twinview feature as well, and many gnome games and apps when maximized will stick to just one monitor - not the full width of the 2 screens. The main app I use where this doesn't work correctly is Outlook 2007 - when the app window is on one screen, and I open an email, the message window opens on the other screen. This isn't the desired behavior.

Mind you, I'm not complaining - you guys have created a great product, and I'm extremely happy with everything you've done so far.

A little more on this...another annoying side-effect is that using cx to run an app,
the GPU bridge is routinely disabled (the bridge-port is connected to my second screen).
This isn't a problem at the time - my PVR will be idle in the background, and blissfully
unaware that it's lost it's view-port. However, once you quit the app/cx task, the GPU
bridge/view-port is re-enabled, the PVR output reappears 'in the wrong position' - this
could be half on the primary screen, half on the secondary screen...all on the primary
screen...or anywhere inbetween. Shutting down and restarting the PVR fixes things, but
it's still 'un-cooperative behaviour' between cx/app_in_question & the host system. This
might only happen when cx/app goes fullscreen...not sure yet. I must yet check through
all the spells and incantations possible in X config - perhaps there's an answer here.

Another reason I'd like to see this fixed, is for old games that
are at their best in 640x480_60 on something like the 17" analog
CRT I've got sitting idle under the house. The old standard 640x
480 mode in a window is near useless on new hires widescreen panels
and the like...it's like trying to play on a mobilephone screen...

Serious retro gamers probably already know this, and already have
an old CRT display plugged into their videocard's second port -
it'll be nice to be able to direct cx/wine output that way for
many of the older games titles.

Please Note: This Forum is for non-application specific questions relating to installation/configuration of CrossOver. All application-specific posts to this Forum will be moved to their appropriate Compatibility Center Forum.

CrossOver Forums: the place to discuss running Windows applications on Mac and Linux

CodeWeavers or its third-party tools process personal data (e.g. browsing data or IP addresses) and use cookies or other identifiers, which are necessary for its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in our Privacy Policy. You accept the use of cookies or other identifiers by clicking the Acknowledge button.
Please Wait...
eyJjb3VudHJ5IjoiVVMiLCJsYW5nIjoiZW4iLCJjYXJ0IjowLCJ0enMiOi01LCJjZG4iOiJodHRwczpcL1wvbWVkaWEuY29kZXdlYXZlcnMuY29tXC9wdWJcL2Nyb3Nzb3Zlclwvd2Vic2l0ZSIsImNkbnRzIjoxNzA4NjEzODE4LCJjc3JmX3Rva2VuIjoiQWIzSlp5VkprSG1RaDVjaCIsImdkcHIiOjB9