Split Screen

[Martijn]

Since you guys are trying realize all available features i might have a nice one…. It will be a challenge however….

I would love to have a Split Screen option in Bigbox.

I have a big cabinet with a 41 inch screen and 4 player control panel. It would be very nice to have Bigbox split the screen so that player 1 and 3 can play a game on the left part of the screen and player 2 and 4 can play the same or a different game on the right part of the screen.

Some details:

• My control panel layout is P3 - P1 - P2 - P4
• Bigbox menu should be split up in 2 screens, a left and a right one.
• P3 - P1 control the left screen (system/game selection)
• I normally have games stretched to fullscreen 16:9 ratio. Games (classic systems) on the screen must start at their Original 4:3 ratio. You are then left with black borders on top and bottom. So maybe you have to use different emulator versions (just a copy) in another folder with 4:3 ratio selected.
• Since the screen ratio does not work for all systems (does not work for systems/games that are 16:9 and some systems are to heavy to run twice you may need to select which systems are availalbe in split screen mode.
• There are some keys that are used to control the game (exit game, pause, load, save). No one has these keys double on the control panel. So it would be nice that a single press of these buttons acts on screen 1 and a hold of the same button does the same action but then for screen 2.

If you manage to accomplish above then it would be no problem to even make a four player split screen. Then every control has its own bigbox menu and can play its own game. The aspect ratio can be 16:9 to fill the whole quater of the screen. On good hardware gameboy, NES, SNES systems there is enough power to play 4 games/emulators at once. You might even play link games together

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[Christian]

This isn’t possible. Or least not to do in any sort of way that provides a consistent experience for the user. To do something like this we would need to be able to pass to each and every emulator and game screen dimensions as to where to launch the game. We would then have to be able to tell those same emulators/games to ignore input from any controller EXCEPT the one that had selected that title. We would have to make Big Box pause for each independently should the user press that button. While it sounds cool there simply is not a way to do this with how the computer is made to be used.

[Jason Carr]

It is possible, but it would be so insanely difficult to implement that it just wouldn’t be worth the end result, unfortunately. It would require a very hacky solution, and sadly there’s just no way we can get something like this going.