Fable 3 on secondary display

[coldmeat]

So I just got a 360 wireless receiver for my pc, and I'm trying to play Fable 3. When I first got the game I started playing with the keyboard/mouse but I felt it would be better with a controller.

I have my tv set up as my secondary display, it's a Samsung pn42a450. I want Fable to play on the tv instead, so I can play it while sitting on my bed. I can't get it to maximize on the tv instead of my monitor.

I remember once being able to do this with COD4, all I did was run it in windowed mode, then drag it over and maximize it, then every time I played it after, Windows would remember and automatically open it on the tv. That was back when I had XP I believe, now I have Windows 7 x64.

Fable 3 just keeps maximizing back on my monitor. So I tried changing my tv to the primary display, thinking that even though it's a huge PITA to do it, I could live with it (the tv's resolution is only 1024x768 so it resizes all my windows, and moves all of my icons which I then have to manually resize and move back after), but Fable would still jump back to my monitor once I went back to fullscreen.

Any ideas?

 

[Attic]

Have you set Fable to run at 1024x768?

Could it be that Fable is set to run at the res of your computer monitor and when you go full screen it is causing issue?

For the sole purpose of playing Fable 3 with the 360 controller from your bed, which I think is worth it, you could disable your computer monitor from the desktop properties and then launch the game. Then re-enable your computer monitor when your done playing.

 

[coldmeat]

I haven't tried playing it at 1024x768 because my computer isn't even running that resolution on the tv, because since it has rectangular pixels, if I run that resolution, everything on it is stretched really bad. So I was running 1366x768, but I was left with a little bit of wasted space around the edges, which never really bothered me.

So what I did over the last hour or so was downloaded and installed Ultramon, and I set up 2 profiles. Main and Game. Basically Main is my usual setup, with the monitor as primary. For Game I set the tv as primary, and disabled the monitor, so now Fable works, and I'm running it at 1366x768.

I kinda have a new problem now, which I might just leave alone. I was fooling around in the Nvidia control panel, and was trying to resize the screen to fix the gaps around the edges. It was working fine, but now suddenly it won't change off of 1080p, so my tv is now running a resolution of 1842x1062 or something. It looks like shit with text, but movies and games still look fine.

This really isn't the best solution by far, but as long as it's working, I'm not going to try and fix it.

 

[coldmeat]

Ok so no matter what resolution I choose to play at, it has the gaps around the screen, like it's zoomed in slightly, unless I play at 1768x992 (some resolution that randomly showed up in-game).

 

[coldmeat]

Well it turns out I'm stupid and the over/underscan issue I was having was fixed by a simple setting in the tv menu, but I still can't get the game to fullscreen on the tv without disabling the monitor.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Games do not like being on a secondary monitor.
Try changing your TV to be Monitor 1 (primary Monitor), that should fix the problem. Then you could just change which monitor is monitor 1 each time you want to play.

 

[Attic]

Well it turns out I'm stupid and the over/underscan issue I was having was fixed by a simple setting in the tv menu, but I still can't get the game to fullscreen on the tv without disabling the monitor.

If i'm on same page then I think i have seen something like this in my TV menu with a setting marked with options of -2 through +2.


Regarding the 1080P quality, I can see where desktop on the TV may look poor with 1080P because of text readability, but games and movies should look ok given that your TV takes a 1080P (1080i?) signal from HD capable devices like blu-ray players. Id imagine games may look best at 1080P if the TV scales the image well to it's actual pixel size.

On my old TV, 1366x768, games looked better when rendered i ran them at 1080i. Though I got better performance at 720P.

 

[coldmeat]

Games do not like being on a secondary monitor.
Try changing your TV to be Monitor 1 (primary Monitor), that should fix the problem. Then you could just change which monitor is monitor 1 each time you want to play.

I had tried that earlier, but Fable 3 was being stubborn and would only go fullscreen on my monitor, whether it was the primary display or not.

I settled on using the 2 profiles in Ultramon, with the gaming one disabling my monitors, and making the tv the primary. I also set the tv's resolution to 1680x1050, the same as my monitor, so that the windows don't resize.

I'm still playing the game at 1366x768 because I figure the tv can't do any better, so I might as well keep the resolution lower and take the performance increase as a bonus. It looks good and I guess that's what really matters.