play steam games on 2nd monitor while doing work on 1st monitor

[Ninja3D]

so i wanna be able to let my nephew play steam games on my tv screen while i do work on my main pc monitor, my monitor is connected with a hdmi and i got a vga cable for the tv which works on my pc also, how can i connect it so the games can be running on the tv while i can use windows normal on my main monitor?

 

[anbello262]

The only way I know of doing that is some "multi-seat" software, because you would need to be able to use 2 mice and keyboards at the same time.
I can recommend Aster multiseat as one such program, which is quite affordable for home use. Has a free 30-day trial, so you can try and see if it works for you.
This lets you run 2 independent instances of your PC.

 

[greens]

That won't really work. You could in theory run a game in fixed window mode and use a controller only, that may work if the game doesn't depend on having "focus".

You see, when you click off screen during a fullscreen game - the fullscreen game will minimize. Fixed window mode takes care of this. But fixed window mode is basically just a window, and as you know, you can only type/click on the window that has focus. As soon as you click a word document, his game will lose focus and his inputs will be sent to your word document, and vice versa.

Sound is also a problem. There is no native option to have separate sound sources outputted from a single audio device in your PC. There are software solutions but i haven't found one i liked.

 

[greens]

A simple VM would solve this problem wouldn't it?

 

[gillhooley]

would a Steam Link allow this?

 

[anbello262]

I don't really know about VMs that can seamlessly accept 2 sets of independent input devices, but I don't have extensive experience on them.
I insist on using software designed for this, "multiseat software".
They are sometimes expensive, but for this kind of home use, you can get by with a cheap one with no issues. Only limitation I know of is that only 1 instance can run fullscreen games at a time (the other is free to do anything else, as long as it doesn't require full-screen running)

 

[greens]

Well yeah if you can get any kind of potato PC hooked up to the TV, you could cast your steam stream to it no problem at all.