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DosBox games and dual monitors....


NeveroddoreveN

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Yesterday, I installed a second monitor to my gaming computer, which went beautifully! Now I can have two monitors going at the same time. Here is my issue... I have Microsoft Excel open in the left-side monitor, and am playing a Dosbox game (Might and Magic II), but when I have the game running in right-side monitor, I can't use Excel in the other one. How do I have a game running in one monitor and use Excel in the other? Just for clarifications sake, I have the correct Excel spreadsheet up in the left-side monitor and the game in the right-side one. I need to be able to go from the running game to Excel and use Excel - every time I have both programs running, the game runs fine, but I can't change any information in Excel. Please help!

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First, I thank you for your post! I intend to have a game running in one monitor and an Excel spreadsheet in another. All I want to do is be able to work with Excel while the Dosbox game is running. Not sure if I had said this before, but the game I am playing takes up the entire screen.  That said, I can't take the desktop cursor into the second monitor. You had asked if the mouse is stuck in Dosbox - I would have to say yes, because with a non-Dosbox game (so far), I can have the game in one screen (full screen) in one monitor and still be able to manipulate any other (non-Dosbox) program just fine. So yeah, I guess it could be considered that the cursor is locked in the first monitor with the game, because I can't put the mouse cursor to the second monitor.

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CTRL-F10 should release the mouse from the DOSBox window,

Trapped mouse cursor

Q. My cursor is trapped within the DOSBox window when I click inside. How do I get the cursor out?

A. DOSBox will capture your mouse when you click inside the display window (and you have autolock=true set in the Dosbox.conf). Simply press CTRL-F10 to release the mouse.

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Just did some testing with a couple of different DOSBox builds I have installed and how well this works or if it works depends on the build you are using.

I don't use the 0.74 build or the one that comes with Launchbox but I can confirm this works perfectly with the ECE build of DOSBox https://blog.yesterplay80.net/dosbox-ece-en/

I loaded up Eye of the Beholder in fullscreen mode and then pressed Control + F10 and it freed the mouse to move to my 2nd monitor while the game stayed running and fullscreen on the main monitor.

I tried this with another build which I really like (https://aeronextedit.wordpress.com/dosboxscummvm-ports/) using but it didn't work, this build though does have certain other minor issues especially in terms of fullscreen stuff.

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I want to thank everyone for their posts and suggestions! I appreciate all of your help! Just as a heads up, the game in question is called "Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World" - it came out back in 1988 and was the first CRPG I ever played! So fun! Anyway, I tried the Control-F10 tip, the game still runs just fine, and I can see the mouse cursor on the same screen as the game, but when I try and take the cursor to the left, it stops at the edge of the same first monitors screen. While running any other program so far, when I want to go from the first monitor to the second one, all I have to do is move the cursor to the left edge of the screen and it will "jump" from that monitor to the other one. I really hope this is worded right and makes sense! Thanks again, everyone!

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Ctrl+F10 would have been my suggestion. If that doesn't work, the only other thing I could really suggest is just outright running it in a window. You can press Alt+Enter while it's running to switch between fullscreen and windowed; and you can set it to run either fullscreen or windowed by default by editing your dosbox.conf and setting either fullscreen=true or fullscreen=false respectively. You can also specify the window resolution via windowresolution= so you can still make it occupy most of the screen while windowed if you so choose.

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  • 4 years later...

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