Is this even possible?

[hellob]

I am going to be traveling to Atlanta next week to meet up with some friends and one of them is in the process of building a computer.(have most of the parts ordered) The problem is that they won't be able to play games like l4d2 with the rest of us and I thought of something. I set up a Virtual Machine in VMWare Player for my spare copy of Windows Vista 64bit. I plan to have the VM running on one monitor and the normal desktop on the other. The VM will run 3d stuff fine, but I am not sure how I can get two independent keyboard and mouse inputs.(2 keyboards/mice attached) I know there is a way to set this up, but I just can't remember how. Does anyone have any ideas?

I am expecting quite a large performance loss if this works, but it should run well enough for decent play and letting both of us play TF2 on the same server at the same time on the same PC or on a L4D2 LAN server. They would log into their steam account on the VM and mine would be on the host OS, will steam boot one of us or will we be fine?

Specs:
Core 2 Quad Q9550(VT-x enabled, thankfully(2 cores for host, 2 for guest))
nvidia GTX 260c216
8GB DDR2 800 5-5-5-18 (finally a use for this)
Windows 7 64bit(HOST OS)
Windows Vista Hp 64bit (GUEST OS)

[~~ArdEnuff~~]

Originally Posted by hellob

The VM will run 3d stuff fine

It really won't.

A VM Ware "SVGA II" adapter (IIRC this is still the virtualised adaptor in VM Ware) is not going to handle LFD2/TF2 etc. It does have some limited support for 3D applications but modern games need a fair bit more than that - pixel shader versions etc. If it works at all, it will probably be horrific.

Have you tried running any games yet in your VM?

You could always just play some CS1.6 in software mode, in fact an old engine like that might even run in OpenGl or DirectX modes as well.

[hellob]

Originally Posted by ~~ArdEnuff~~

It really won't.

A VM Ware "SVGA II" adapter (IIRC this is still the virtualised adaptor in VM Ware) is not going to handle LFD2/TF2 etc. It does have some limited support for 3D applications but modern games need a fair bit more than that - pixel shader versions etc. If it works at all, it will probably be horrific.

Have you tried running any games yet in your VM?

You could always just play some CS1.6 in software mode, in fact an old engine like that might even run in OpenGl or DirectX modes as well.

I had furmark running at over 60FPS inside the VM, but as far as games go, I haven't tested much. The WEI thing gets a solid 5.9 in the VM as well.

EDIT: Tried l4d2 and while the framerate was good, the sound wasn't working right, so Ill just put this in the "failed experiments" pile.