How to split screen on one mac?

[bartolo]

Hello! First time poster, long time admirer!

I'd like to dual-box on my Macbook, and I've got my two copies of WoW as well as CloneKeys, but I'm not sure how to split my screen. I've looked into Maximizer and tried setting it up, but I believe it's only a PC program. Now I know that once I get all my macros set up I could potentially never have to have my clones screen up anyways, but I think it'd be nice if I could split the screen nonetheless.

Is anyone else dual-boxing on a single mac laptop? If so, what are you doing about splitting the screen? Thanks!

[bryanc]

I used to play on a Mac, and used something like this to get WoW to run fullscreen on a display other than the primary display (which the game just wouldn't do otherwise). Should work to run WoW on the one half of the monitor too.
If your custom w/h changes the aspect ratio, you need to manually set the gxResolution in WTF/Config.wtf to match or the game will look squished. Edit: I'm vaguely remembering now that WoW was stubborn about changing it's aspect ratio (and instead would honor only the width in this script, and set it's own height). Sorry I'm not in front of the Mac right now, but I'll try to dig up the solution I eventually found this evening.



tell application “World of Warcraft”
activate
set the bounds of the first window to {x, y, w, h}
end tell


I'm not sure how in applescript to specify which World of Warcraft since you'll obviously have two instances of it running. I know you can rename "World of Warcraft.app" though and the game still runs just fine. But I'm not sure if changing it's name causes problems come patch time or anything, since I only tried it a few times to see how effectively my old Mac could run two WoW instances (verdict: very slowly).

[bartolo]

Would I have to change any settings in the wow .wtf file, like you would on maximizer? also, what values you do plug in for x and y, assuming that since my machine is 1280x800 and i want a top and bottom half, i would put the two programs as 1280x400 for height and width? thanks!

[bryanc]

x,y is the top left corner of the window

[Schwarz]

I recently leveled 5 shamens up to 18 using my macbook. What I did was run the 5 wows one ontop of each other. I figured I didn't need to see what was going on the other screens. It was pretty painful usually got around 4-8fps. I did clear RFC and tried WC but got sick of all the pats.

[bartolo]

I'm sorry, I don't know anything about apple scripting :( I compiled your little code blurb, and entered the width and height I want, but I don't know what value to put for x and y, and it doesn't want to work without them. thanks again.

[bartolo]

Schwartz, what is your setup? RAM, etc.

Did you find an increase in general performance if you dropped a couple guys? Meaning if I'm just dual boxing, will I be laggy as all hell or alright?

(Macbook - 2 Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2gb ram)

[Schwarz]

I have a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo 2 GB and I am running Tiger (10.4.11). I don't know about you but even when I run one WoW I don't have good performance. Hasn't held me back any but during 25 mans I am getting like 5fps. The only time that I really had a problem was when I was trying to tank Vashj's adds (can't really predict where they are coming from so it was hard to grab them up quickly).

Send your self some friends requests and try it out. It was alot of fun really laggy but alot of fun. I am trying to figure out if I want the new 24 inch alu iMac or building a computer to just to dual box.

Oh and my macbook is black that might have something to do with the performance

[bartolo]

, So bryanc, any suggestions as to what variables I need to put into the x,y, h, and w spots, if i'm looking to split my 1280x800 display into 1280x500 and 1280x300? Also, I tried to rename one of my warcrafts to .app but it said one already existed, so I renamed it World of Warcraft Clone, and your script seems to be opening the right one. I'll just have to be careful when patches come around. Thanks again for the help.

[bryanc]

You'll want to set x,y to the location where you want the top left corner of WoW to be. The top-left corner of your desktop being 0,0 and the lower-right corner being 1280,800. So, {0, 0, 1280, 500} and {0, 500, 1280, 300} or something close to that. You might need to tweak that to accomodate the menubar (WoW probably just covers it up, but I used it to run on a secondary monitor so I don't know for sure).

I'm pretty sure you'll have a problem with changing the aspect ratio, and I don't remember how I solved it offhand (didn't get around to looking yesterday -- sorry). But try it out and see what it does.

[bartolo]

Ok, more updates:

When I try to launch the script from above, with value set as 0,0,1280,500 for x y w and h, the application does open up, but I get an AppleScript Error saying "World of Warcraft got an error: Can't set bounds of window 1 to {0, 0, 1280, 500} And the window is exactly the same size as normal.

Now, when I open up one of my WoW config.wtf files, I see the line about 6 or 8 down saying SET gxResolution "12800x800". If i change the numbers here to 1280x400 or 700x800, when I launch the program my screen is indeed closer to the right size, but it's not exactly right, and is often very stretched or squished, depending on which was I split it.

So any other ideas? Man, I wish something like maximizer worked on macs :S I'm surprised no other mac users are splitting their screens for this.