running 2 games at once

[Letgomyleghoe]

hi, im building a new system and was wondering if its possible to run 2 instances of the same game at once, my pc has good enough parts to run 2 games but im worried about running 2 keyboards and mice, and if its even possible to run 2 instances of the same game at once 

[TheBean]

you can run a VM... running 2 instances of the same game on the same host is rare for modern games. even if your pc CAN do it, developers DISABLE that for whatever reason. 

[RAM555789]

Use VM software to set up 2 computers in 1. Its the easiest and best way to divide up the resources between the machine, however you will need 2 accounts/2 copies of the game if there steam games.

 

Edit: If your offline you might be able to run 2 instances then of a steam game on the same account but as I've never tested this I can't say for sure. 

[Letgomyleghoe]

Just now, Saksham said:

you can run a VM... running 2 instances of the same game on the same host is rare for modern games. even if your pc CAN do it, developers DISABLE that for whatever reason. 

yeah thats big dumb, im sure more people would buy a game if they could do bassicaly a lan party on one pc.

[Letgomyleghoe]

Just now, RAM555789 said:

Use VM software to set up 2 computers in 1. Its the easiest and best way to divide up the resources between the machine, however you will need 2 accounts/2 copies of the game if there steam games.

if i have them downloaded is that okay??

[TheBean]

Just now, scuff gang said:

yeah thats big dumb, im sure more people would buy a game if they could do bassicaly a lan party on one pc.

 

[Letgomyleghoe]

1 minute ago, RAM555789 said:

Use VM software to set up 2 computers in 1. Its the easiest and best way to divide up the resources between the machine, however you will need 2 accounts/2 copies of the game if there steam games.

 

2 minutes ago, Saksham said:

you can run a VM... running 2 instances of the same game on the same host is rare for modern games. even if your pc CAN do it, developers DISABLE that for whatever reason. 

any recommendations on vm software

[RAM555789]

1 minute ago, scuff gang said:

yeah thats big dumb, im sure more people would buy a game if they could do bassicaly a lan party on one pc.

LAN is just uncommon now since internet connection is a lot better than it use to be.

[Letgomyleghoe]

1 minute ago, RAM555789 said:

LAN is just uncommon now since internet connection is a lot better than it use to be.

yeah but lan party as just the idea of getting people with pc's together to play games in the same room

[RAM555789]

I would use VMware, under personal non-commercial use its free, https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player/workstation-player-evaluation.html

[RAM555789]

I've used some of their earlier versions of the software and I remember it being pretty easy to allocate the resources between the physical and virtual machine. You'll just need a second monitor, keyboard, mouse, ect. for your second person to use the VMware.

[Letgomyleghoe]

Just now, RAM555789 said:

I've used some of their earlier versions of the software and I remember it being pretty easy to allocate the resources between the physical and virtual machine. You'll just need a second monitor, keyboard, mouse, ect. for your second person to use the VMware.

nice thanks!

[Windows7ge]

 If you decide to virtualize do note there's a number of prerequisites.

1. A lot of bigger games will require a GPU & accompanying driver meaning you'll need two GPUs for two VMs.
2. Your motherboard/CPU will need support for either Intel's VT-d or AMD's Chipset enabling IOMMU for enabling IOMMU groups.
3. You need enough CPU cores & RAM to support 2 virtual computers and the hypervisor.
4. You need to find USB ports in different IOMMU groups to pass-though to the virtual machines for each to have keyboard & mouse.
5. You will have to do the error code 43 workaround if you have NVIDIA GPU's as NVIDIA doesn't want their desktop cards used in VMs. (Note the workaround isn't always successful, some GPUs just don't run well in VM's.

There are more hurdles to jump though but those are the immediate ones that come to mind.

 

At least that was my experience. @RAM555789 Maybe VMWare is different? I haven't used it.

[JZStudios]

48 minutes ago, scuff gang said:

yeah but lan party as just the idea of getting people with pc's together to play games in the same room

To be fair, you're asking for more of a split screen solution than a LAN solution. Either way, both of them are dying out. I have Flatout 2 and there's a mod/program that launches it in 2 windows and you LAN "connect" them. There's something kind of similar for Halo CE, which makes me wonder if the MCC collection will have split screen and co-op.

Maybe it'd be worth looking into the particular game you're looking at?