2 boxing on same machine.

[stroudja]

[wuma]

[darkpaw]

[Scalia]

[Shiuna]

[Scowls]

[Chris]

[Brohg]

I 2box on one machine np, with far less system capacity. I'm running a four year old Dell p4 1.9MHz with 512MB of RAM. I do have much longer zone times, but other than that no issues with lag. I load EQPlaynice from long habit, but I think it stopped functioning last year sometime. I run from two installs of Everquest, one has only environmental particles, the other none at all. Neither uses pixel shaders, or shadows. Both installs have nosound.txt in the run directory. Each install has only one or two Luclin models on. The secondary install is trimmed back to single layer sky, but both run full clip plane.

[Tharkis]

I 2 box on a single system and I have no problems at all, just using a single install directory and the same settings for both instances.

Dual Xeon 2.4GHz 533fsb processors, 2Gb DDR2700 ram, ATI Radeon 850XT AGP vid card driving dual monitors, running at 1280x1024.

[jdthomas]

Whenever I run two instances of eq on one machine, whichever instance I loaded first runs very slowly. No crashing or anything, the first instance just runs slowly. At 1gb, I've always felt it was a memory issue.

[Poguk]

I run 2 windows on an old Athlon 1.8 GHz with only 768 MB of SDRAM (not DDR), and it runs perfectly, even on raids. Of course, I have almost every single option turned off.

You need WinEQ2 (with EQPlaynice), which is what I run. I do *not* have 2 separate EQ directories, I use the same directory.

In EQPlaynice options, make sure you change your settings... the front window I usually keep on a frame-limiter to around 25-30 FPS, because you really don't need more than that. The background window (my 2nd "box") is set to frame-limiter and I only keep it at 5 FPS. You're not viewing it, so why refresh it constantly and use up system resources?

When you set up your profiles in WinEQ2 (1 for each instance of EQ), make sure you set SOUND OFF for each profile.

When 2 boxing, you're more concerned about performance than quality, so crank those options down. Turn only the necessary models on, for instance, the race of the 2 characters you play, because you need the new models to use horsies. Everything else, leave off. Turn off your sky. Put your clipping plane at 50% or lower. Use as low of a resolution as possible... sure 1280xwhatever is nice, but 1024X768 works just fine, and it less intense on your system. Turn off shadows, water, anything that takes up memory.

And then finally --- make sure you hit Alt-Enter frequently! I don't know exactly what this does behind the scenes besides refresh your view, but I've noticed that my machine gradually bogs down after a period of time if I don't do this. It almost seems like Alt-Enter forces a cleanup of the video memory... maybe indicating some sort of leak... I dunno, that's not my forte, but all I know is that hitting Alt-Enter keeps things running smoothly for hours on end for me. Btw, once you load both windows, and hit Alt-Enter on both screens, that first time it takes a LONG time, but just wait it out, let it finish, then after that it will Alt-Enter much faster. I also hit Alt-Enter after I zone, since zoning loads a lot of crap into memory.

[Beafly]

I run 2 instances just fine with 3.0ghz P4 (dual-core), 800mhz FSB, 1gig ram, 128MB Nvidia GeForce FX 5700. I do maintain and run from 2 seperate installations of EQ and I run them from entirely different Hard-drives. I didn't notice any appreciable performace increase from running seperate installations till I moved the second one to a different Hard-Drive. I highly recommend doing this. I run 1024x768, all character models, high textures, sound, spell effects, etc. on my main instance and my bot instance I run 1024x768, Male Dwarf, Female High Elf and Horses/Elementals models, low textures, no sound, no spell effects, etc. I do not use winEQ and I run exclusively in windowed mode (never full screen). I zone almost as fast as I do with one instance loaded unless I zone both characters at once (ports, evacs, emergencies).

[Manitae]