This afternoon we had a visit from Isaac’s godfather, the fabulous Mike McQuaid. As we stood in my study watching the boys playing LEGO® Marvel™ SuperHeroes on my PC I remarked to Mike that I wished that there was an option to use both my monitors, rather than squeezing the two-player co-op onto one 1920 x 1080 screen.
Mike was pretty certain that should be possible and after a quick ‘google’ he unearthed information about NVIDIA® Surround, which “joins multiple displays into a single immersive viewing surface”, typically used for full-screen gaming or watching full-screen video. However, we soon discovered that it requires three displays and I have only one.
This evening, not taking no for an answer I did some internet searching of my own and discovered SoftTH which claims to do the same thing as NVIDIA® Surround but on any number of monitors regardless of whether their resolutions match or not, and so long as they are plugged into a PCI Express graphics card.
How to…
I read somewhere that configuration could be a bit cumbersome but it actually turned out to be fairly straightforward. The trickiest bit, to be honest, was locating the game files (see below).
- Download SoftTH.
- Unzip the two files: d3d9.dll and readme_SoftTH2.txt somewhere handy.
- Locate the directory where the game EXE file is located.
- Copy the d3d9.dll file into that directory.
- Run the game.
- SoftTH runs and checks for the location of a config.SoftTHconfig file. If it doesn’t find one it creates a default configuration file.
- Once the game loads (on one monitor) adjust the screen resolution two the new default setting (in my case 3840 x 1080), and the aspect ratio to “From Screen-Res”.
- The screen resolution will change, stretching across both monitors and now two player co-op uses one screen for each player.
Locations of EXE files
We have quite a few LEGO games installed so I had to hunt around for their various locations within C:\Program Files (x86):
- \LucasArts\LEGO Clone Wars
- \LucasArts\LEGO Star Wars – The Complete Saga
- \Steam\SteamApps\common\Lego Indiana Jones 2
- \Steam\SteamApps\common\LEGO Marvel Super Heroes
- \Steam\SteamApps\common\The LEGO® Movie – Videogame
- \Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment\LEGO® Batman™ 2
- \Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment\LEGO® The Lord of the Rings™
Caveats
I have a fairly decent graphics card (NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 660) so this worked for each LEGO game I tried. I didn’t play each game for long so I couldn’t attest for how reliable this is played over hours, but I couldn’t see anything that might suggest that it wouldn’t. A few notes from my 30 minutes experience of this…
Taskbar on monitor two
I discovered when returning to the games that if I had any other applications open on monitor two (I’m running Windows 8 here) then once SoftTH was running it still showed the taskbar.
My workaround was to right-click the taskbar before the game started and select “Auto-hide the taskbar” which slid it safely out of the way.
Character tables
The first real niggle I had was when selecting a new character why does the game present the character table in such a squashed-up way?!
The same is true when both players change characters at the same time.
Not suitable for one player
My second caveat is that as beautiful as the periphery scenery looks while playing, game play isn’t very sustainable if you are playing a single player game because your character stands right in the middle of the screen, and so is divided between the two monitors.
Cut screens?
My last word of warning is more of a hunch than from experience: I imagine that certain pre-rendered cut screens throughout the game may display in a strange way as they are not optimized for such a wide screen.
UPDATE: Actually, the cut screens on the whole were okay. You do lose some detail as you’re essentially viewing them through a huge letterbox, but it’s mostly viewable.
Targeting is disrupted a little
UPDATE: One thing I’ve noticed is that targeting with certain objects is now a bit off with the double-screen set up. For example, on the opening level with Hulk and Iron Man you need to target a water cannon at Sandman: where you direct the cannon and where it actually sprays are two different locations. On the next level you need to target one of Captain America’s locks, but it’s near impossible to line it up properly without quickly nipping back to a 1920 x 1080, single-screen resolution.
Conclusion
On the whole, I was really impressed. It was simple to set up, with absolutely no configuration from me.
I’ll show this to the boys tomorrow and see what their verdict is: usable or not? Then I’ll report back.