This is a clearing house of how to get up and running with Innerspace/Isboxer and multiple instances of EQ2. Please submit your tricks or suggestions to this thread and I will add them to first post(s).


[This will be an ISboxer focused guide with minor emphasis on the hardware requirements]


Important Links:

Innerspace Innerspace setup/wiki Isboxer setup/wiki Isboxer getting started

If you are using Innerspace then you should be using Isboxer along with Windowsnapper, repeater and keymapper. There is no need to use Keyclone here at all.

Briefly, Windowsnapper will handle all of your window region positioning and PiP functions. Repeater will handle all of your keyboard/mouse multiplexing across all of your instances even to other machines with IS installed. Keymapper is the utility used to setup what keys you want sent where (which includes roundrobin, whitelist/blacklist) and is very powerful once fully utilized.

Hardware:

Gaming devices supported by IS: Logitech G15 and G11 (though not G13 or G19 yet), Nostromo n52 Speedpad works, also older USB X-keys devices work (newer firmware support has not yet been confirmed but is implemented).

Quoted from Lax (IS developer) with regards to Multiplicity/Kavoom KVM type software:

ISBoxer now has KVM Mode directly from one to another game window or windows (on the same or other PC), which you might find preferable to having to move the mouse across -- you keep your mouse on the original game window for mouse placement (that should be some good time savings), and you will see the cursor on the other window as well. You would set up a Mapped Key to switch destination windows (there are a couple examples on the KVM Mode page)


-EQ2 is a resource hog, no getting around it. Don't expect to run full graphics with even a top end machine and one instance without some hiccups. I use a Q6600 @ 3.0 Ghz with 8gb ram and Ati HD 4870 1Gb video. Six instances of EQ2 at minimum graphics brings my computer to its knees. All processor cores are at 80% or above all the time. I am confident that I could run 4 instances of EQ2 on this machine and turn up the graphics on the master a little.

-There is a lot of software rendering going on in EQ2. There has been rumors of off loading to the video card coming soon (we can only hope).

- The sound processing is another sticking point of mine. Your sound options are very limited. You can have software sound by default (recommended) or you can use hardware sound (eax/creative/soundblaster). Hardware sound is a little bit annoying to setup and when I tried to run multiple instances with EAX sound on some very bad things happened. So it shall be software sound from now on. As far as I can tell, you can not disable the sound in EQ2 which is very, very annoying. I turn the sound down on all the slave instances and leave it at that. No doubt a large performace gain could be had if we could somehow disable the software sound processing on all the slaves.

First step to multiboxing EQ2 is set your graphics performance to minimum, aka lowest quality (the bottom choice on the performance drop down). This gives you a proper starting point for running multiple instances.

Innerspace setup: EQ2 and EQ require the game to be "locked foreground" for accepting keystroke input, so make sure you check this box for each character.
First install Innerspace on your machine. This is subscription software but there is a 7 day trial available on that page for those wishing to try it out.
Next is to add your EQ2 game installation to your game menu as explained here. Next download and install ISboxer (Note: Make sure ISboxer is installed to your Innerspace directory). This will install the newest versions of WindowSnapper, KeyMapper and Repeater to your Innerspace installation.

Now go back and watch the videos on the ISboxer wiki on how to setup your teams. Read the Isboxer getting started wiki page.

Next post: setting up keymaps.

Work in progress.....