Gaming on secondary display

[asiga]

Veteran Mac user here, but I just made a special setting for my living room, so that I have a 4K 32’’ monitor as primary display, and then I also plug the 50-ish’’ TV as secondary display for watching media with VLC Player and gaming.

I have no problem in running VLC in fullscreen on the TV, …but games and emulators, and crossover… oh my, what a mess: No matter how I configure Spaces, most games will fullscreen to the primary monitor only, and there’s no way to move them to the TV, unless you set the TV as primary display.

Is this also your experience? Do you always set your gaming display as primary? I’m a long time MacOS fan, but the fullscreen management is a real mess when you have several displays, unless I’m missing something.

 

[galad]

Most games are hard-coded to run on the primary display, there isn't much that can be done.

 

[Huntn]

This post probably won’t help but…
On Windows, you can “extend” a display across several monitors, but I don’t do this. I do have a a secondary monitor that I can have a normal computer display while a game plays on my main monitor. However I imagine that if I had a TV setup as a secondary display, I could in Windows designate it as the main display, if it detected it (unknown) and whatever would appear there if I wanted something to play on the tv. I just have a MBP and I’ve not experimented with using a TV as a secondary or a primary display. So the question is, in the macOS, can you designate your TV as the primary display for the purposes of playing video on it?

 

[asiga]

This post probably won’t help but…
On Windows, you can “extend” a display across several monitors, but I don’t do this. I do have a a secondary monitor that I can have a normal computer display while a game plays on my main monitor. However I imagine that if I had a TV setup as a secondary display, I could in Windows designate it as the main display, if it detected it (unknown) and whatever would appear there if I wanted something to play on the tv. I just have a MBP and I’ve not experimented with using a TV as a secondary or a primary display. So the question is, in the macOS, can you designate your TV as the primary display for the purposes of playing video on it?

Yes, I guess the only failsafe approach is to change the primary display whenever I'm going to use the Mac for gaming, and set it to the TV.

Another possibility I was considering is to use a HDMI switch (two outputs with only one of them active) if they work fine with MacOS and if they are not expensive, because, actually, I don't use the monitor and the TV at the same time: the monitor is for work, the TV for gaming and media watching. That's the reason why I set the monitor as primary, because I want things as comfortable as possible when working.

 

[dedric39]

Yes, I have the same problem. If you don’t make the second screen the main screen, games always start on the first one. macOS does not work well with full screen games on the second display. It would be nice if this was fixed.

 

[dmccloud]

Veteran Mac user here, but I just made a special setting for my living room, so that I have a 4K 32’’ monitor as primary display, and then I also plug the 50-ish’’ TV as secondary display for watching media with VLC Player and gaming.

I have no problem in running VLC in fullscreen on the TV, …but games and emulators, and crossover… oh my, what a mess: No matter how I configure Spaces, most games will fullscreen to the primary monitor only, and there’s no way to move them to the TV, unless you set the TV as primary display.

Is this also your experience? Do you always set your gaming display as primary? I’m a long time MacOS fan, but the fullscreen management is a real mess when you have several displays, unless I’m missing something.

Some games (but not all) have an option to select the primary display for that title. Other games will default to running on the primary display. This is actually not dissimilar from Windows and how games handle multiple monitor setups there.