A single display in multiple monitors

[ppo]

I don't know if this belongs here, but I have some CRT monitors and I want to connect them so that I can make a unique display, in which each monitor displays a part of the image.

The monitors are all from '92 to '98 and I have a bunch of Pentiums and one 486.

Can I connect all of them to one computer or do I have to connect each one to a computer?

Is there a program to do it, if yes, will it run on old machines?

Ideas and suggestions needed.

 

[Bobthearch]

The easiest way using semi-vintage machines would be to divide the picture into sections and load one section onto each of several computers.

 

[Tetrium]

If you have it, use a dual head VGA card. iirc older VGA cards were not easy to set up as dual display. I think cards like S3 Virge and earlier were harder as many cards of that age and before didn't properly support running as non-primary displays. I'm not sure though, the only way to find out is to simply try

 

[Lutiana]

You are talking about a display wall. I am sure that something could be rigged up at home to play with, but I can tell you that the pros use signal processors to that. These will generally take in a single input from any source and output them to an even number of displays, these devices are not cheep.

If you are using windows, then I would cram as many video cards into the system as I can, preferably dual head capable ones. Set windows to use all of them, download and install a program called Multimon (google it) and you should be able to do it from there.

Windows 98 will support quite a few monitors.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182708 - Hardware Requirements for Multiple Display Support in Windows 98

 

[Raven]

Depending on your budget, things like what I plan to get someday (when I have money) are those like the Matrox Triple-Head-2-Go which are effectively a tiny signal processor that reports itself as a huge monitor to Windows and then splits the signal that it gets out to the monitors. They have dual and other variations. One of these costs about $300.

 

[ppo]

I was going to use one computer for each monitor, but 5 or 6 pcs and monitors working at the same time should consume a lot of energy.

I was going to do that for my project, but apparently the school's electric system won't handle it.

 

[vwestlife]

I have an old Matrox PCI video card from 1998 that has two VGA outputs. In Windows you can set it to either display the same thing on both monitors, or to set up one large "virtual desktop" split between the two, so you can have each monitor displaying different things. The Matrox also has ribbon cables attaching it to a separate TV tuner/video capture card. The video capture uses a proprietary Matrox MJPEG codec which isn't supported by Windows XP, so this is strictly a "legacy" Windows 95/98/ME setup for me. I'm not complaining, though, because I got it for free out of a trash-picked computer.

I know that more modern computers allow multiple video cards to be installed, so with dual-output video cards, you can set up two times as many monitors as you have free slots on the motherboard.

 

[Lutiana]

I was going to use one computer for each monitor.

Oddly that is more work than just slapping multiple video cards into a single machine. You would have to have some serious network type protocols to be able to send the data from each machine so they all could keep up.

Check out this wikipedia article on multi-displays

 

[Raven]

If you were using all-modern machines there's software to do this in Vista/7 by some company, can't recall who or what it's called.

 

[Ole Juul]

If you were using all-modern machines there's software to do this in Vista/7 by some company, can't recall who or what it's called.

Well, with modern machines, for a no hassle nothing to buy approach, Compiz is what people are using these days. Check you these two:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p3X7CdE2oc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec&feature=related
The first one is using pretty old software (8.04) and I don't know about the second one. Of course, you'll still have to buy the hardware.