[Feature Request] Displaying each screen to a different window

[hiddeninthesand]

For those of us with multiple monitors, this would be a preferable way to play games. Having the top screen and bottom screen on different windows would allow you to put both screens on different physical monitors, meaning you don't have to share any of the screen space with any given emulated screen.

[dyBBelyBTASTIC]

This is possible on Windows & Linux by using features outside the emulator. Linux: xrandr Windows: NVIDIA Surround or AMD Eyefinity. MacOS: Use DeSmuME, as it supports this feature for MacOS nativly.

On Windows w/ NVIDIA Cards: NVIDIA Control Panel > Configure Surround, PhysX (Under 3D Settings) > Check mark -> Span displays with Surround This makes both screens work as a single screen spanning both panels (even in exclusive fullscreen)

On Windows w/ AMD Cards: No idea, as i dont have a PC with an AMD card to test, but it should be pretty easy to setup regardless.

Inside MelonDS: Screen Gap: 90px, Screen Layout: Horizontal, Screen Sizing: Even Fullscreen the emulator (by setting a hotkey for exclusive fullscreen) and you get one DS screen centered on each of your panels

/tested with 1920x1080 resolution

[JamesYeoman]

Unfortunately, Nvidia Surround can be quite problematic. It can get itself into a state that prevents you from disabling it. It's fairly inconsistent, because I was able to enable and disable it easily in horizontal mode, but the second I tried vertical mode, it refused to apply any settings changes.

It seems like an untested piece of functionality, or at the very least an underutilised piece of functionality, because I've found reddit posts of people complaining about it refusing to disable, but the traffic on the posts is quite low.

1. Post from r/techsupport
2. Post from r/buildapc
3. Post from r/pcmasterrace

There's another problem with the nvidia surround solution: graphics tablets won't be able to target a single screen for mapping the input area to. Instead, they'll only be able to target the pseudo-screen.

Is there any chance that a split-window mode will be considered? It'd be significantly more reliable than nvidia surround

[patataofcourse]

split window is a planned feature but it requires refactoring of some code which isn't very mantainable rn so its probably gonna take a while

[StrikerMan780]

Definitely would like such a feature. That way I can put the top screen on my main monitor, and the bottom screen on my pen tablet for touchscreen stuff.

[ben401rs]

indeed and i absolutely agree, just an idea, on my OneX portable pc, the CEMU emulator can rearange the display so that the main monitor is for the game display and the second for the touchpad, its really cool feature

I suppose its not just making the each display into separate windows, im sure its gonna be tricky but worth to add feature to the emulator considering the usecase potential

[user18081972]

I'm sure theres some hack that allows the emulator to just spawn a second window, and using some desktop-composition feature (atleast in windows) to just draw the output of the main window to the second window, clipping out the coordinates of the bottom display. Kinda like https://github.com/LorenzCK/OnTopReplica does.

[nadiaholmquist]

There might well be a hacky platform-specific way to do it, but to implement it it would need to work on all supported platforms.

[StrikerMan780]

I don't know if you're using SDL at all, but if you are, you can create as many windows and render contexts as you want in a platform-agnostic way.

[andrewkehoe2]

This is possible on Windows & Linux by using features outside the emulator. Linux: xrandr

dyBBelyBTASTIC, Can you elaborate on using xrandr for this?

[memmam]

Would really like to see support for this. I have a ROG Ally with a second screen attached, and Eyefinity is unfortunately disabled in the AMD Software and so doesn't even show up as an option. I imagine this is also the case for other similar PC handhelds, like the Lenovo Legion Go, Steam Deck, the various Ayaneo, ONEXPLAYER, GPD, etc handhelds, and I'm not sure if there's even an option for something like Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround from Intel for Arc-based handhelds like the MSI Claw.

[memmam]

Alternatively what would also work in my case would be the ability to fullscreen MelonDS across multiple displays as one window? Not sure how viable that would be.

[memmam]

For anyone else affected by this, I actually found an AutoHotkey script that achieves the effect I'm going for. You can find it here. This works as a stopgap measure until people working on MelonDS have time to implement this functionality natively. :slightly_smiling_face:

[stevenbrookslv]

This would be an EXTREMELY helpful feature