Have you run into the dreaded ‘how do I use two iPads as extended displays’ problem, and struck out trying to use xDisplay and Duet etc. together in wired mode?
Not happy with the performance of wireless Splashtop/Spacedesk etc for the second tablet?
Splashtop and Spacedesk and etc–in wireless mode–are more or less just a virtual display (“indirect display” in Windows parlance) and VNC in a commercial wrapper, with all their extra cruft and its round-trip degrading performance (plus another hand in your pocket).
Have you already realized this, but struck out trying to create a virtual display in recent versions of Windows without having an open HDMI port and a physical dongle to trick windows into seeing a connected display? (Now that the ‘Detect’ dialog no longer permits creating a generic VGA display.)
No more. There are downloadable indirect display drivers, liked below, that don’t need a dongle. Using one of them together with a VNC server that supports serving a designated display only will let you present a virtual display of an arbitrary size, with no dongle, to as many tablets as your system and network will support (zooming in on different parts of the virtual screen on each; or, with more setup, multiple virtual displays specifically served to different tablets).
Here’s the commercial driver:
https://www.amyuni.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3030
and an open-source alternative:
which has a fork to read in settings from an options.txt here:
These posts (and the thread generally) explains how to use the drivers:
and here:
Basically, you need to create a couple batch files to add and remove the virtual displays.
You can then serve the virtual display – and only the virtual display – via TurboVNC by configuring it from a batch file like so:
tvnserver.exe -controlservice -sharedisplay *n*
where n is the display number of the virtual display as shown by ‘Identify’ in the Windows ‘Rearrange’ dialog. (This is also the number referenced by AirManager for moving a panel to that display.)
(There may be other VNC servers that will do this, but TurboVNC was the one I found first.)
If you then run a VNC viewer on your iPad (or other tablet, or secondary computer for that matter) and point it at your sim machine, you’ll get only that display. Performance should be better than Splashtop wireless, Spacedesk, etc.
For even better performance, that should be pretty close to a USB connection, put a wired Ethernet adapter on your tablet (presuming your sim machine has a wired connection). Or a hub with an ethernet port and power delivery, so you can charge while it’s in use.
You can also try enabling network tethering over USB – I haven’t experimented to see if that interferes with another tablet being connected via xDisplay, Duet, etc. But if you do this, remember that it will create a different subnet, so you’ll need to reconfigure the VNC server to be listening on the right interface, etc.
If you want to serve multiple virtual screens to separate tablets, instead of having one large virtual screen and zooming in on the panels, you’ll need to dig into the TurboVNC docs to figure out how to run multiple instances of the service on different ports and bind them to the different virtual displays.
On the tablet side, I have found that both TurboVNC’s viewer app (‘Ripple Viewer’) and RealVNC’s viewer app work fine (for iOS).
I run the PFD on the xDisplay connection, and the MFD on the wireless VNC connection. VNC’s latency over local wifi is much less noticeable on the MFD (and much improved over Spacedesk & etc).
