play a game on my mbp display and look at other things on the external

k so i have a mbp and i have it connected to an external display, i want to play a game on my mbp display and look at other things on the external, i understand that if i click a window on the external it might pause the game, but i dont care

Can the game run in a window? I think your problem is that when you enter full screen, the external monitor turns black, right? I'm not sure if you can get around that, but if it is possible, I wil definitely stick around to see another reply

I think you need to turn off mirroring, if you haven't tried that already.

I have a mbp and a display hooked up—mirroring off— and when I try and start up a game, the mbp is the only one that engages. So I suppose my question—augmenting the original one— is if once he starts up his game, is there any way to move the window to the display, similar to the way you drag other windows over normally?

Of the few things I've tried in extended desktop, it seems that pretty much anything running in full screen mode blacks out the second display.

First thing is to check is if the game settings allow for windowed mode instead of full screen. Then you can drag it to the other desktop and enlarge it to fill the screen similar to other apps.

The second option is to make the external the primary display. To do this, go to System Preferences - Displays - I think it's the appearance tab you need. You're looking for the picture of the two monitors. You'll notice one of them has a white bar at the top. This represents the menu bar. Drag and drop that bar to the other monitor - this will cause your external to become the primary display while it is attached. Now when you launch that game that only runs in full screen mode, it will be on the external display.

I've had a different experience. I have dual monitors hooked up to my Mac Pro, and I am able to play a full screen game on one monitor, and use the 2nd monitor to do e-mail or web surfing.

The one limitation with this setup is that I'm only able to do "mouse" related activity (pointing & clicking) on the 2nd monitor (the non-game monitor)...otherwise if I use the keyboard the commands apply to the game on the primary monitor.

So maybe the blacking out of the 2nd monitor depends on the game.

- Nick

Never had the experience of this behavior from a desktop machine either, but both of my Mac notebooks exhibit this same characteristic.

bobtomay said:

Never had the experience of this behavior from a desktop machine either, but both of my Mac notebooks exhibit this same characteristic.

Click to expand...

Hmmm...maybe it's a laptop vs. desktop thing. Maybe the dedicated video card or cards in a desktop (not necessarily talking iMacs) are more "flexible" when it comes to gaming & using a 2nd monitor to do other things.

Maybe I'll have to try an experiment with my laptop with an external monitor, and launch the game that I'm using on my desktop, and see if the external monitor blacks out or not.

- Nick