WOW Multimonitor and Vista

Consider this a Howto. (with a bad picture)

1. install WOW and get it running.

OK now we find that since Vista has removed the Stretch window option we can only run on one monitor. There isn't much we can do about full screen mode, but we can run in a Window and stretch the window across the monitors. This works, but the window grows in height as we stretch horizontally, since WOW is trying to maintain the aspect ratio.

To fix this, edit your config.wtf file and edit the gxResolution line, it's important to note that if either the width or height specified on the resolution line exceed the resolution of your primary monitor, it will just be reset. All that matters for now is that you pick something with the correctaspect ratio.

I'm using a pair of widescreen monitors, with a final resolution of 3840x1200, so I set my gxResolution line to one quarter of that 960x300.

SET gxResolution "960x300"

Note that under vista if you don't run WOW as administrator, it seems to ignore the settings in Config.wtf, so run it as administrator.


OK at this point, you should be able to stretch the image in the correct aspect ratio accross the two monitors.

I was almost happy with this but I really hate the stupid window border, I really wanted the equivalent of the maximised check box in the graphics options. i.e Maximised across both monitors with no border. Unfortunately setting the Miximized option will of course maximize to just one monitor.

I messed around with various multmonitor utils and none of them did what I wanted, so I wrote a program to do exactly what I wanted to the WOW window.

http://www.polygonhell.com/wind1.exe

It's a command line utility, and has to be run as administrator (since it needs to modify another processes window), basically it finds the first window with the start of the title "World of Warcraft", changes the stype flags to remove the window border and then resizes the window to the specified size.

There is minimal error checking since it was a quick hack, it takes upto 4 parameters, x, y, width and height (see below). if you omit the arguments it defaults to 0,0,640, 480

wind1.exe -1920 0 3840 1200

That's the command I use, the X is negative, because it happens my primary monitor is to the right of my secondary monitor, you can run it multiple times to move and resize the window, but there is no functionality to restore the border.

This is not a keylogger, and for the overly paranoid the source code is below if you want to build it yourself.

EDIT -- Fixed a problem in identifying the correct window, under some circumstances it would find the button on the Taskbar instead of the window and just do nothing. Revised code below, also updated exe at the above link.

// WOWFullScreen -- Hack to maximise the window with no border to an arbitrary area
//

#include "stdafx.h"
#include "windows.h"


int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    WCHAR *match = L"World of Warcraft";
    int x = 0;
    int y = 0;
    int width = 640;
    int height = 480;

    if (argc > 1)
        x = _wtoi(argv[1]);
    if (argc > 2)
        y = _wtoi(argv[2]);
    if (argc > 3)
        width = _wtoi(argv[3]);
    if (argc > 4)
        height = _wtoi(argv[4]);


    WCHAR name[1024];
    HWND wind = 0;

    HWND window = GetDesktopWindow();
    HWND child = GetWindow(window, GW_CHILD);
    child = GetWindow(child, GW_HWNDFIRST);
    while (child)
    {
        GetWindowText(child, name, 1023);
        unsigned int  style = GetWindowLong(child, GWL_STYLE);
        if ((style & 0x160f0000) == 0x160f0000 && !wcsncmp(match, name, wcslen(match)))
        {
            wind = child;
            break;
        }
        child = GetWindow(child, GW_HWNDNEXT);
    }

    unsigned int  style = GetWindowLong(wind, GWL_STYLE);
    unsigned int  styleEX = GetWindowLong(wind, GWL_EXSTYLE);

    style = style & ~( WS_CAPTION | WS_THICKFRAME);
    SetWindowLong(wind, GWL_STYLE, style);
    SetWindowPos(wind, HWND_TOP, x, y, width, height, 0);

    return 0;

}