New - not sure if Dualboxing is what I need

[Svpernova09]

Was this changed in the past half decade or so? I remember in school crawling under desks in IT to plug a second mouse into my friends computer to fuck with him. They both would work.

By separate devices I believe he means 2 mouse cursors. You've been able to use multiple input devices for a good while in Windows. However there isn't any software (that I'm aware of) that will allow each device to have its input focused as if it was it's own computer. I vaguely remember (late 90s) such a device that claimed to do this however it wasn't something I would have recommended.

[MiRai]

Was this changed in the past half decade or so? I remember in school crawling under desks in IT to plug a second mouse into my friends computer to fuck with him. They both would work.

Of course they both work, but you can't assign one device to one game window and a second device to another game window without third party software.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Was this changed in the past half decade or so? I remember in school crawling under desks in IT to plug a second mouse into my friends computer to fuck with him. They both would work.

Two mice can control one cursor, which is how Windows works today and why you could screw with your friend's head.

The problem regarding the OP's desire is that Windows by itself cannot maintain focus to more than one app at a time. The window/app that has focus is where all mouse clicks and keyboard keystrokes are sent unless you have specific software/hardware set up to route those differently. I'm presuming it would also require some hefty modifications to the Windows GUI as well, as there are video rendering (DirectX) complications when that window does not have focus (see the "Audio in background" option in WoW, for example). The fact that there are so few reliable multiboxing applications (which work around a lot of these issues) is further evidence of the complexity of this type of use case.

[luxlunae]

You could sort of do this through a multiboxing approach. Say one of you sits on the left and runs the "active" character with the mouse to move and the numpad to control abilities, and then use isboxer or AHK or whatever to pass WASD and 1-= to the second instance.

Not a comfortable way to game together though, by any means. Just tell her to buy her own laptop or get her a cheap one off craigslist.

Was this changed in the past half decade or so? I remember in school crawling under desks in IT to plug a second mouse into my friends computer to fuck with him. They both would work.

They both work, but they fight for control of the same cursor, this guy wants separate mice for both of them.

[Madadd]

It worked!

I plugged in the second keyboard and mouse into any old usb ports, extended the desktop to the second screen, installed, restarted and went through the very brief keyboard/mouse setup. Viola. At first all sound was coming through my speakers. I switched the audio between the tv and speakers a couple times and messed around in the softxpand settings (I really didn't think I did anything of consequence in here) and got the audio to come out in the appropriate place for each client. So user 1 on the desktop got audio through the speakers, user 2 on the tv got audio through the tv. Performance wise, I did not notice ANY difference with my setup. I did not overclock (still at stock clocks and timings). All in all it was a rather easy setup.

Notes:
We had trouble signing in under the same user at the windows login (go figure). Easy workaround, just create a new user/guest account.
Need to copy the game files to either a different location on one of the clients. Not sure if it's just another folder or you need to put it on a whole other HDD. I did the latter.
For this particular game (maybe all games, idk), one of the clients will need to create a shortcut of the diablo.exe file and add -launcher to the end of the target field.
Sometimes on client 1, when using the diablo launcher it would startup on client 2's screen, and sometimes Vice-a-versa. Doing the above on both clients will remedy that.

The one problem I still have is occasionally client 2 will black screen and after a minute the windows login will come up as if it just restarted. When trying to re-enter the game, the shortcut that was created pointing to the copied game .exe gave me an error (i don't remember what) and had to be re-created. I don't know why, but I'll be looking into it today.

Edit: It seems like the trial version of softxpand: " (all workstations will automatically logoff from SoftXpand every 1 hr)" Which seems about right, timing wise...Although it sounds like all clients would be logged out, but Client 1 was unaffected by this. I still don't know if this is the real error...I'll probably go ahead and buy it tonight and I'll update on this issue tomorrow. Also it doesn't explain the shortcut suddenly not working.