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johndmuller
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Capitol Hill, Colony of DC
Feb 2001
time: 00:21
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Assuming you have multiple video adaptors or a multi-display card, you might (or might not) be able to control which screen(s) displayed SMAC, but it depends. I only know it from hearsay, but my understanding is that this sort of thing is possible under the Win98, etc OS family. I know personally that it did not work for me with Win2K (SMAC will occupy both monitors) when I tried to do it; while Win2K can do some of this sort of thing, it seems to have limited ability to differentiate between monitors - for example, it doesn't want you to have different resolutions on them. I was using an ATI card with multi-display support; perhaps there are other brands with more intrusive monitor support that can handle this. Also, it may be possible with XP; I haven't tried it there.
It is possible to get SMAC out of full screen mode (sort of, at least) by a kludgy process like this:
Run 2 instances of SMAC with your display set to some resoultion above 1024x768, like 1280x1024. When you exit from one of them, the screen resolution will return to windows standard, i.e. 1280x1024, leaving SMAC occupying the upper left corner, and your regular desktop in the remaining reversed 'L' shaped area. The SMAC is effectively in 'always on top' mode and cannot be resized or moved, but there is the other area where you can do normal windows stuff for what it's worth. You can probably do similar stuff if you force SMAC into its lower resoultion with the entry in the .ini file letting you squeeze it into a smaller area of the corner or allowing you to run windows at 1024x768.
To the extent that SMAC's cpu usage doesn't interfere with them or vice versa, it is certainly possible to have other jobs running at the same time as SMAC and to switch between things with alt-tab, etc. SMAC's sound can be turned off if it interferes with whatever else you are trlying to listen to, although it seems that it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't, depending on ???.
Multiple instances of SMAC are certainly doable, assuming you have sufficient resources, which is reasonably likely with typical newish systems; aside from possible confusion, it doesn't seem to cause any problems. Of course, if you had multiple copies of the same PBEM, one of them would have triggered the reload warning and if you had to explain it, there might be an element of suspicion created  .
Last edited by johndmuller on 12-10-2004 at 13:48
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08-10-2004 14:40
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