How to set up a television or projector as a 2nd monitor for your computer.

First of all, it is important to determine what TV you are going to hook up and the connections that will be required before anything else can be done.

1. What inputs does your TV or projector have?


a) Composite
b) Svideo
c) Component
d) DVI – this link usually sends only video but is capable of sending audio if used with an HDMI cable/converter from the source side to an HDMI input.


2. What outputs does your computer's video card have?


a) Composite
b) Svideo
c) Component
d) DVI – Sometimes common more-so in projectors, this link usually sends only video but is capable of sending audio if used with a HDMI cable/converter from the source side to an HDMI input.


3. Connecting the video card to the TV or projector.


a) Composite to composite
b) Svideo to Svideo
c) Component to component
d) DVI to DVI
e) DVI to HDMI (with HDMI adapter on the computer's DVI interface)

This how-to is based on the Nvidia video chipset. If you have an ATI or other video card or chip, this tutorial is not for you as it uses Nvidia control panel to complete the tasks.

I am using a Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS video card which can send video, using a supplied cable, as component video or using an adapter on the DVI interface, as HDMI.

First, ensure you have the latest settings for your video card by visiting Nvidia.

In your system tray in the bottom right of your screen, right click on the Nvidia icon. When you move your mouse over it there is a popup that says “NVIDIA Settings.” Left click the option for NVIDIA Control Panel.

On the left menu, left click Display top open the menu if it's not expanded already. Then left click “Run multiple display wizard.”

Left click “Next” then select how you are connecting to your 2nd screen. The computer should detect the video connection as long as you have your cables connected. In my case, I'm using component cables to connect to my projector. The computer detects the connection and marks it as component.



Left click “Next”and select the standard for your connection. Component will handle 1080i, but your TV or projector also has to support it. In my case, my projector can support up to 1080p so I select 1080i since that's the highest option available to me.

Now you select whether you want your main display to be cloned (use the exact same screen) that your TV will use or if you will have them configured separately.

If you use Clone, both screens must be the same resolution so if you are running 1680x1050 for example and your tv runs at 1768x992, both of them will run 1768x992 (1080i HDTV). If you select “Clone” and left click “Next”, everything is set up and you can click “Next” then “Finish.”

If you use Dualview however, you can keep your main screen at your higher resolution and create a custom resolution for your TV. If you select “Dualview” and left click “Next”, select the resolution that your primary screen should (or is currently) running at. Mine is running at 1680x1050 so I select that and left click “Next” twice and then click “Finish” to close the multiple display wizard.

Now, you should be set to use your 2nd screen. After the wizard runs, you will have your screens configured already in dualview mode with your primary screen on the left and your secondary screen (TV) on the right. What that means is in order to do stuff on your new TV screen, you move your mouse cursor off the right side of your main monitor and it will appear on your TV screen. You can move windows or applications from your main screen to the 2nd TV screen by clicking on the title bar and while holding down your left mouse button, drag the entire window or application over to the new screen. If you double click the title bar, it will maximize. This is especially handy if you use Netflix to watch online movies. Then you start your movie and click the full screen button on the Netflix movie viewer. What happens now is that the video will show on your new TV screen while the audio comes out of your computer speakers. That's because only HDMI transports audio along the same cable. You will need to run a separate audio cable to your TV in order to have the sound come out from it. Or if you use a sound system, you can run the audio to that. My motherboard has digital coax audio S/PDIF so I run that to my home theater system for 7.1 surround sound.

Now the other trick is that when you do NOT want to have the second screen active, you can disable it easily through the Nvidia system try icon. Left click the icon, select either video device, nView Display Settings, Single Display then select your primary monitor – the one not listed as HDTV probably.

Microsoft Natal

Microsoft wow'd this years E3 with their demo of project Natal, a game and multimedia system without a controller. That's right, no remote. Built on technology used in recently acquired 3DV Systems' ZCam, the camera for the Xbox 360 will be able to scan you or an object you hold and relate to them real time or use them as shown in this video.



Next to come will be the purchase of code to extrapolate the object's DNA from the scan and using cloning technology to take over key people in the US government and the business sectors, Microsoft will be in a position to take over the world!!

My top 10 multiplayer games

My family and friends love to play games together. Here is a list of games I have found and enjoy playing. It is not in order and not dedicated to a specific gaming platform.

1) World of Warcraft (PC)

Ok, a little background on this. For many years, we would only play games together that absolutely did not require any kind of payment. Period. I flat out refused. Then my friend brought his PC to my house with this game and was showing us how it worked and how much fun it was questing. Yeah, we were hooked. I set up my trial account which lasted a day before I realized I couldn't get mailed items

and ended up purchasing the game. That wasn't enough though. I didn't have the same version that he did so I had to upgrade to the Burning Crusade expansion. Now there is Wrath of the Lich King. This game, although pay-to-play at about $15/month, is so massive that when they take servers down for maintenance every tuesday, sometimes it takes them over 12 hours to finish. I can't even begin to imagine how many servers they have and how many people they have managing them. I hope for their sake they are running this all on vmware clusters, or the like.

So this fun *little* game is fun because I can play in groups with my friends, we help each other quest, fight in PVP together against the swarms of horde, or just waste the day away trying to accomplish all of the strange and mostly worthless achievements that came with the latest expansion.

The boring part is the grinding and farming. Grinding experience is where you go and kill a bunch of stuff and complete quests as fast as you can trying to get to that next level where you can get more fighting skills and train more profession skills. Farming is where you do the same thing but in order to raise your reputation with different factions (groups), gather green, blue and purple items (and orange sometimes), or to get certain materials or gold, or stuff to put on the auction house for the highest bidder.

Some people just socialize, dancing on the fountains in the cities, or doing a line dance while making train noises in the auction house (they must be REALLY bored).

2) Scorched Earth 3D (PC)

For those of us that have used the old IBM clones or early DOS based PCs, we know that this comes out of an archaic cult classic game where a gorilla tosses an exploding banana at another gorilla in a city. That was 2D.

Then there was Scorched Earth, the mother of all games. My roomate in college and I would play this after class, before class...when we weren't playing Warlords. In those days, not many people had a computer, or we would share one in our dorm. So, hotseat games became very popular. Many people would take a turn on one computer which would play out before the next person's turn. Then they added simultaneous mode where everyone would tell the computer what they wanted to do and it would do EVERYTHING at once. Wow, where'd my shot go? How'd you get your baby missle inside my heavy shield?

So what is the obvious progression from this wonderful game? Why, 3-dimensional warfare of course. New weapons, new environments and beautifully FREE! They made their project opensource and anyone can develop MODs for it (gaming environments, weapons, tanks) Any you can play with up to 24 people...holy crap. Some of the weapons you can buy take out half the map on their own when launched by 1 person. The graphics, sounds and gameplay are fantastic for a free game.

3) AdventureQuest (PC)

Ok, this game isn't truly multiplayer, although many sites look at it as such. It's a unique game that is kind of fun to play where you can buy unique weapons, armor (like ninja, mage, berserker) and spells, go on quests and the buy-in for lifetime gameplay as a Guardian is $25. My son and I enjoy this one.

4) Mario Kart (Wii)

This game is fun to play online, but it's a pain to connect with your friends. We gave up after a while since it took so long. However playing it in the house on the Wii and big screen is a real blast. Zoom around taking out the computer players or each other, battle to gather coins, or just race. You can set the teams, chose your ride and your famous Nintendo cartoon characters.

5) Halo (Xbox, Xbox 360)

This game has come far and is a cool series to play for people who enjoy a good frag like in the gold old days of computer games such as Duke Nukem and Rise of the Triad as well as the Quake and Doom games. You can fight against each other in multiplayer with grenades, highpowered guns and rocket launchers. Halo 2 ads the ability to use a one-handed weapon in the off-hand. Watch out for those needlers! You can also play in co-op mode where you help each other defeat the bad guys. Just don't run into your partners friendly fire...

6) Metal Arms (Xbox)

Glitch! You rusty bucket of bolts! This game is a blast to play. If you have kids, you can tell that the main general is swearing when he's giving Glitch his orders, but everything is always bleeped out. The weapons are so much fun, but where it really gets fun is using the robots that you can take control of or even get into and fight with! I enjoy grabbing myself a rivet gun and amassing an army of robots to follow me, which works well until someone makes them think I'm on the wrong side...

7) ExciteBots (Wii)

Online or split-screen, this game is so much fun to play. Playing as a animal/bug shaped robots, you drive on a course and score soccer goals, knock down bowling pins, smash your competition, chomp them in the butt and you soar so high into the sky you can't always see where you are going to end up.

8) MafiaWars (Text game on Facebook and many other social networking sites.)

A little bit of harmless fun where your mafia family battles against other mafia families. These families are merely friends you have invited to join you. With forums dedicated specifically for that purpose, it's fairly easy to get your mafia up to the 501 max allowed for you to fight with. However, the higher you go the more special items you can buy (1 for every 2 levels) and properties such as Mafia Mike's. You have jobs that you have to repeat in order to master a job tier before moving on to the next set of jobs. You have special loot that you collect and store in your vault for bonuses.

9) Texas Hold-em (Facebook, and many others)

I like playing this on Facebook because it's totally free, unless you choose to buy in with extra cash, but it's totally unnecessary. The graphics are wonderful and so is the gameplay. There are even drinks or gifts you can give to fellow players, which is nice to do when you have all of their money.

10) Perfect World (PC)

This is an anime based mmorpg similar to World of Warcraft but free with extra pay options. The first thing you notice when playing this game is that you can really jump far...and fall far without taking damage. The quests can be a little difficult to figure out at first but people are very helpful. The graphics and audio on this game are stunning and provide a very relaxing atmosphere.

ExciteBots: Trick Racing for the Wii

ExciteBots is one of the most exciting games I've seen for the Nintendo Wii for a long time. It's the sequel to their release of ExciteTrucks and is a lot of fun for me, my wife and kids. My wife played it for a few hours and she doesn't usually play racing games. She likes games like Mario Party. She's an animal lover so I think the bugs as vehicles really appealed to her.

Pros
I love the bugs. It's cool in the middle of the game when my bot ends up walking on its legs after picking up a wrench and stomp on the competition, or soar through the air on wings with tons of air time and skip huge chunks of the course to catch up to the leader. My son loves the huge choice of bugs available and the different colors to choose from.

The zany games such as soccer, bowling, darts and the tambourine all add to the skill involved with staying on the course while trying to complete these challenges.

I really enjoyed the graphics. Such bright and vivid colors give me the feeling of being outdoors on a sunny day even if it's stormy outside. Connecting to my screen through component video probably helps a bit with the graphics. You can't get me to go back!

Cons
Yeah, you guessed it. The remote/sensor has a hard time of telling sometimes when I want to turn, especially when I get excited about my flip into the air and my power boost off of the pink bar into the tree just off of the path when I land while I try to frantically turn my bot and steer it away. Argh.

The red bar is a pain in my frogs nitro butt. Really. For some reason, the computer bots land on the bar and are already half way through getting off of it by the time my frog has gone up 2 marks. The idea is that you're supposed to move your wheel (or just your remote) in a circle in time with the bot as it goes around the bar.

Turning is also kind of hard in this game. Especially in the air, while I can see that my frog isn't very aerodynamic and has no wings to be able to ride the wind, with the game being designed for you to boost off of every hill, bump, rock or mountain, I believe there should be better turning. And while you're on the ground, you end up getting tons of drift for the most turns instead of just turning. Maybe I just get carried away about turning because of my frustration with the remote...

Thoughts
Well, what could make this game better? Certainly improved controls, but what is it missing? Really, not much is missing at all. There are very few weapons involved in destruction which is good for kids. Who needs to blow the competition away with a tactical nuke anyway? Ok, well the idea appeals to some of us gamers. Vehicles with flame throwers, drop some tacks on the road, throw up a smokescreen to blind them, razor sharp shredders to tear apart the tires and chassis of the cars you are rubbing with. Well, ya know...it could be fun, but it's out of style with this game. Maybe a sequel to this game might do just that :)

Firefox 3.5 Beta release 4

The new Firefox is almost here! In fact, I'm testing it right now. It is pretty fast. For those of you who use Firefox as their primary browser like I do, you'll have noticed that it has been getting pretty slow over the past year. I've even tried Google's Chrome browser which is lightning fast...I just couldn't get used to it. They are boasting a 2x improvement over the speed of 3.0 and 10x over 2.0. The other changes are rather unimportant to most users. For a full list of changes, you can visit the beta site at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html. You can also download and test the beta from that site, just remember that it's still beta and is still being worked on.

Wii MotionPlus on June 8th

Nintendo is getting ready to release their long awaited and MUCH needed InvenSense multi-axis gyro based wii remote attachment named Wii MotionPlus. It will be work with the upcoming title releases of the Wii Sports sequel, Wii Sports Resort, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, Grand Slam Tennis, Red Steel 2 - (MotionPlus with swords!) and Virtua Tennis 2009. All coming to the store on June 8th!

Why is the MotionPlus important for the Wii game sytem?
When Nintendo first released their Wii system at the bargain price of $249.99, that was their price point that they had to meet. In order to make it, they had to make a sacrifice on the number of gyroscopes - the little weighted electronic components that determine which way you are moving your remote and how fast (accelerometers). If you have noticed playing different games such as the very competitive challenge games on Mario Party, the games have a hard time of determining exactly what you are doing when you move the remote (flip the chimp!). The additional ingredients in the MotionPlus, which plugs into the bottom of your Wii Remote, is merely what they didn't include in their original design. It allows true 1:1 movement between your hand movements and the movement on the screen.

Ok, so why again is that important?
A lot of people have expressed frustration at the quality of titles released for the Wii gaming system that take advantage of what the Wii is meant to offer - True interactivity. We want to use the remote like a lightsaber in Star Wars or a sword while fighting as a ninja or samurai. It just doesn't work with the stock remote. The sensor can't tell most of the time when you raise your sword up above your head, how fast and what direction you swing it or how exactly it's being held. I can imagine right now the looks of consternation of the faces of the people at LucasArts when they released their game Star Wars The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels. I bet they would have held off releasing the game until this summer if they had known Nintendo was going to release this! Perhaps there will be a sequel...

So now, with the release of this attachment, the hope of all Wii action gamers hangs in the balance. We are hoping that with this release, the big powerhouses will release the type of action games we have been waiting for. PLEASE!

Computer on the Big Screen!

Ok, so I have my big screen with my projector hooked up, my sound system integrated into my room...why not hook up my PC? When I first bought my PC parts, I did so with the intent that eventually it would be a media and gaming PC. I built it with parts from newegg.com, tigerdirect.com and frys.com. With an ASUS crosshair motherboard, 4gb of ram, 1.5 TB of harddrive space, an Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS video card and an AMD Athlon 64-bit FX-62 dual-core processor, this thing rocks. Well it's getting old now, well over a year. But it still has no problems at all with the latest games.

One of the features of my video card is a converter that came with the video card for component video out which with a 25 ft component video cable plugs right into the back of my home theater system. Well, not quite... I also have a Wii and an Xbox both with component video connectors. So I bought an autosensing component video switch with 4 inputs on it. It hides well behind all of the components and I never need to mess with it.

So I plugged my computer video into there and in my nvidia control panel, I set up my new display through my component video as a dualview, so I had a different desktop on the bigscreen. For my audio, my computers motherboard has a wonderfully handy coax audio output that I ran to one of two in the back of the Onkyo HTS.

For my test, I launched my Netflix account in Internet Explorer. Since I had my dual-view on, I dragged my browser over to the big screen, maximized the browser window, selected my movie and ran it full screen. Everything was wonderful, just like watching a DVD from your own DVD player. Of course, don't try it if you don't have high-speed internet. A full movie download will take you many hours.

So now I came to a problem. After my movie was over, I decided to watch a DVD. Now there was no audio! Apparently what is happening is when my computer audio is hooked up to the home theater system, the audio from the DVD player, as well as the Wii and Xbox will not play. So my fix, at least for now unless I find a better solution, is to unplug the coax for the computer audio fromt he home theater system when I'm not using it. Not the best solution of course, but it's a start.

Another thing that I did is whenever I'm not specifically using my big screen, I use my Nvidia settings icon in my system tray to set my nView display settings to Single Display (for my primary monitor) so that my mouse would not go off of the right side of my screen, and it also will not send video out to the home theater system.

Now, if I want to...I can use my bluetooth mouse and keyboard and use the big screen as my primary monitor! Not very practical at the moment, but possible :)