Thommos Blog: Triplehead Shenanigans

I was pretty excited this week because after a long time of yearning for one I finally got myself a Triplehead2Go Digital. The Triplehead2Go lets you combine three monitors into one virtual monitor for both Windows app work and gaming. The digital version is the cool one that does bezel management to make the desktop look as seemless as possible.

People must be getting ready for the ATI 58XX series multi-monitor cards and starting to dump them or maybe I just got lucky because I saw the TH2GO on Australian Ebay with a ridiculously cheap buy it now price. They just don't show up on Ebay often and to buy them new it's $650+ bucks. I got mine for less than half that.

Well I plugged in the TH2GO, the three monitors and ran up the software. All good. I was then prompted to reboot the PC. Then the fun started - a black screen. Fine I thought, unplugged it all and plugged in the single monitor - again a black screen.

Oh crap. I pulled out the drive, attached it to another PC via a SATA to USB convertor and editted the BOOT.INI to put in the /SOS switch on the Windows startup so I could get the boot log on screen during startup. I also threw in /BASEVIDEO for good measure. I then put the drive back in my PC and booted. I now had the scrolling text bootup sequence that stopped at system.log. Bugger. That's not particularly informative. I hoped the registry wasn't cactus. I booted the PC from a Windows XP SP2 boot CD to get into the recovery console and look around. But in the Windows setup startup, I got the blue screen of death with a STOP error indicating an inaccessible boot device. Arrghh. Must be a special driver to access the SATA disk.

So pulled out the original OEM Windows XP install CD. Booted into Windows setup ok and started up the recovery console. I listed the Windows services using LISTSVC and saw two Matrox services set to autostart - "Matrox Centering Service" and "Matrox.PDesk3.ServicesHost". I disabled both those services, crossed fingers and rebooted.

Yay! Windows now booted ok. Big sigh of relief. Now to get the damn thing to work. I've run it up ok on my laptop and three screens, so the TH2GO is ok, must be some incompatibility with my desktop.

Edit: Got it working with my new PC without to much drama. The latest Catalyst 9.9 drivers dropped support for some widescreen resolutions (why???!!!) including 3840x1024. Versions 9.10 and 9.11 have the same problem. Reverting to version 9.6 fixed the problem. Triplehead configuration for gaming is fantastic.

My TripleHead screenies:

Rise of Flight