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groddjur42
Contributor
Contributor

Multiple (physical) Users on one machine ?

Hi Community,

this may be kind of an odd question but would it be possible to hook up 4 monitors (and 4 usb mouse/keyboard) to a single physical machine so that 4 people can sit there and each of them uses its own VM fullscreen on one of the monitors?

Reason for this: Retro video gaming with Windows 95/98. I don't have "enough" old hardware so I wanted to use a retired XEON server (since each of the VMs only need at max 500 Mhz of CPU speed) with 4 VMs and the 4 users each have their own Screen and own VM, all connected to the server standing in the middle.

Thanks

Martin

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dbalcaraz
Expert
Expert

Hi,

Yes, you could but you should do something "special" I suppose, as you will need to assign each keyboard and mouse to each VM connected to the same hardware.

I saw something similar with Limetech. You can check this Youtube video: 2 Gaming Rigs, 1 Tower - Virtualized Gaming Build Log - YouTube  that can give you an idea, instead of using VMware to virtualize the stuff.

Anyway, you will need the 4 VMs and install Win95/98 in each VM.

-------------------------------------------------------- "I greet each challenge with expectation"
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groddjur42
Contributor
Contributor

I may have found a solution:

On my old HP ML350p server I installed Windows Server 2012 R2 and VMWare Workstation. Additionally I purchased two "Nvidia Quadro FX 580" on ebay (10 Euro a piece). Those cards have PCIe x16 (and my server has a couple of those slots) and can support 2 displays at the same time IF used in SLI mode. If you disable SLI mode then both cards can EACH use 2 displays.

I also bought 4 adapters DP->VGA (each card has 2 DP and 1 DVI), 4 USB soundcards which are supported with Windows 98 SE and two large USB hubs. I think this should work as expected (I hope 🙂 )

Source for 2 cards with 2 displays each:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/315332-33-monitor-suppor

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