I’m using a Dell Inspiron 6000 with XP professional installed (and no graphics card… it steals cycles from the CPU as far as I understand) and have recently pulled out “Escape from Monkey Island” as well “Grim Fandango” and wanted to play them together with some friends. Figuring it’d be easier to watch the action on TV than on the small laptop screen, I was hoping to find a way to do this. I have connected the TV via S-Video and extended my monitor to the TV, but the game always ends up running on the laptop screen, regardless of where the starting interface is placed. Is there a way around this? Could I somehow force the full-screen action into a window, drag the window onto the TV, and then maximize it? If so, how?
As a side note, the only help I could find from Microsoft was that it wasn’t possible to run native DOS applications that required full-screen access on a TV. I don’t know if EfMI (or GF) is structured that way. Also, although the video settings present me with the option to make the TV the default display and turn off the laptop monitor, clicking “Apply” basically resets everything instead of making the desired changes.
If the game refuses to run full-screen on a secondary display, I don’t know of a way to make it do so. However, your graphics card[sup]*[/sup] probably has a “clone” or “mirror” mode, where the TV displays the same thing as the LCD, rather than having two separate desktops. Use that.
(* You do have a graphics card, more or less, but it’s integrated into your laptop’s motherboard.)
EMI and GF are both Windows applications.
You’re on the right track… maybe call your laptop’s technical support? This is the feature you need - making the TV the primary device, either by turning off the laptop screen or mirroring it. You could also try the “use this device as the primary desktop” checkbox in Display Properties.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Each monitor only has two options: “Use this device as my primary monitor” and “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor”. I was surprised too that it didn’t have a clone option. My Win2000 laptop did.
I’ve tried it, but all it does is reset all the settings. I even downloaded the latest drivers today.
As another note, EMI does have a video configuration option, allowing which video output to use. However, it doesn’t seem to matter which I select. Since both outputs are controlled by the same video card, they have the same name in the option box. The only other option is “Primary Display Adapter”, which I think is only a pointer.
If it’s the video hardware I think it is (some flavor of Intel Extreme, most likely), I use mine for what you do all the time (I have an Inspiron 1100, but it’s video hardware is mostly the same as yours).
There should be a setting to let you kill the laptop’s primary monitor (the lcd screen) and use the tv as your primary instead.
Try going to desktop properties. On the far right tab, choose advanced video properties. Under the chipset tab (probably Intel), you should have a button to bring up additional properties. You should be able to switch displays from there.
That’s the slow way to get that dialogue. On my Inspiron, I can just hit…fn-f11, I believe…to get it. Or just right-click the desk top and choose the “output to tv” submenu.
There’s also a fn-function combination that’ll let you cycle through available displays, one at a time. Fn-f6 on mine (I think? Been a while), but I don’t use it that much because I always need to fiddle around with the overscan first.
Yay! That did it (fn-F8)! I don’t know why I can’t do it using the desktop properties (half the other stuff you mentioned wasn’t there and the other half wouldn’t work, despite me telling it to :D), but cycling through the options did it. Thanks so much!
Each monitor only has two options: “Use this device as my primary monitor” and “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor”. I was surprised too that it didn’t have a clone option. My Win2000 laptop did.