Posted: 11/4/2009 6:23 PM
Post subject: 2 players in 1 PC (pc gaming)
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nesrocks
He/Him
Player (246)
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I've searched high and low for info on this without success, so I thought I might ask here: Is it possible to plugin 2 keyboards and 2 mouses on a single pc (with 1 monitor), and just using software make it so that a window only takes input from one set of mouse+keyboard while the other window+desktop takes input from the other mouse+keyboard? What I want to do with this is have 2 World of Warcraft windows running at the same time and then 2 players play on the same screen (will need a big screen). I can open 2 WoW clients and I can log in on both, but I want specialized input for one of the WoW instances.
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 11/4/2009 6:43 PM
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Dromiceius
Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332
The answer is a firm "no" in my experience. Windows has one cursor/pointer, one focused window, etc. Mind you, it was about three years ago that I looked into this, so things might well have changed since then, particularly in Windows Vista/7. If it were me, I'd try using AutoHotkey or Java to hack my own solution. If you could read a HID by some unique ID, you could probably map its input to a certain instance of the game. There'd probably be intractable bugs and lag problems, if it worked at all. It'd be fun to try, though. :D
Posted: 11/4/2009 6:51 PM
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Kuwaga
Joined: 10/20/2006
Posts: 1248
Yea, you'd have to read out the HID afaik.
Posted: 11/4/2009 10:44 PM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
It is possible for a program to read input from two mice independently, but AFAIK the program must have been specifically programmed to do this (there are a few casual games which have support for this). I don't know if the same is possible with two keyboards.
Posted: 11/5/2009 3:42 PM
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ZeXr0
Joined: 8/27/2006
Posts: 883
I think you have to override the usual keyboard and mouse by reading directly the data of the USB ports. I know that windows threat two mouse as only one device, but you can override that.
Posted: 11/5/2009 5:25 PM
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Tub
Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377
google "multiseat". Most solutions require separate monitors and often two different gfx cards as well. Linux has a recent X extension named Multi-Pointer X (MPX) which can handle multiple mice. You'll need a window manager that is able to correctly assign the input devices to windows - to my knowledge, there's only a proof-of-concept WM around. Come back in a year or so or start hacking on it yourself. This would be the cleanest solution. Running WoW on Wine would be the easy part. Or, as has been mentioned, you could write your own input dispatcher for windows. Any result will be hackish at best, and you may run into issues if the game doesn't accept input when the window isn't focused. (you cannot have both focused, obviously) Then you need to write some extra-code so the mouse cannot leave the window, some code to prevent window's default cursor from emitting events, possibly your own code to draw the mouse pointer, ...
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