Dual Screens on the AmigaONE 500

I recently acquired an 'old' Dell LCD display from my dad who found it lurking in the back of a cupboard. I say 'old' because it doesn't seem to have been used and is suspected to have come with a PC some years ago and then for some reason was put away and forgotten about. I decided to put the screen to some use and hook it up to my AmigaONE 500.

I had heard of the possibility of running dual screens on the AmigaONE 500 and was curious to give it a try. My machine has a Radeon HD card connected to a more modern Philips LED display, leaving the motherboard's onboard graphics chip unused. So I connected the Dell display to the motherboard's VGA port and took a look at MUI to see if I could get one of the various MUI screens to use the onboard graphics chip rather than the Radeon HD. This turned out to be pretty simple and just a case of selecting one of the in-built graphics chip's screen modes (see below).

The photo shows the end result with Workbench running on the Philips display, powered by the Radeon HD, and the Odyssey web browser on the Dell. Switching from one screen to the other is slightly odd as you must still click the screen depth gadget to go between the two screens rather than being able to simple move the mouse from one to the other as you might expect. However, both screens are updated so you can keep an eye on something running on one while working on the other.

Despite the modest performance of the onboard graphics this could have some interesting applications. For instance I'm thinking of perhaps getting a small LED, the type used in some in-car entertainment systems, and using it as display for a music player to sit alongside the main one.