Question

When I run my Java game (based on the JGame framework) in fullscreen mode with dual monitors, it only shows on one. Has anyone worked around this before?

Answer 1

This is a very sophisticated issue to resolve without going down to the hardware. What you are asking the video card to do is extremely difficult, if not impossible, at the software level. We’ve all seen video output displayed on a 2×2 or 3×3 setup. But there is a black box that is doing this work – not an everyday application, certainly not MS Windows.

Yes you can drag a window (form, control, whatever) so that it is partially displayed on 2 monitors. But you will also notice that the ‘pieces’ of the window may not be exactly sync’d up. There is also a video memory/bus limitation (I believe) that makes it almost impossible.

My experience with multiple monitors comes from working as a surveillance technician at a casino. We had 3 monitors per PC. If you put one of the video screens into full-screen mode, anything on the other 2 monitors basically froze. In addition, the mouse would not move beyond the bounds of the monitor set to full screen. You might think that this was a limitation in the software, however, at a cost of nearly $10k per seat, I would think that is highly unlikely. Now, we also had multiple monitors on the wall – 2 rows of 8, 42″. We had the capability to set those monitors to simulate a 2×2 configuration – but it was our software telling another ‘black box’ how to split up the video channels. Hope that helps… 😉