Regardless of which space-sim game I am playing, the truth is that there just aren’t enough inputs to handle the entire spectrum of what games like Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen offer. I have a setup right now which includes two sticks (Hands On Stick And Stick, or HOSAS), a set of foot pedals, a Streamdeck, and a 10-keyless keyboard and if you think that this would cover all bases, technically you’d be correct because the keyboard is the most versatile device in the lineup, but it’s also the least immersive. If we go anywhere here at Chez Scopique, we go big.

I used to use GameGlass which runs a server on my machine to which I connect using a tablet or smartphone, but when I moved my iPad over to become the mixology library for my basement bar, I found myself without a device to use with the app. Anyway, it was difficult to set up a tablet in a meaningful location because stabbing the screen with my finger would push the tablet around the desk, even when it was propped up on some kind of stand. I had a flexible arm to which the iPad was mounted, but that has also moved to the bar. Another issue was that the GG app would connect wirelessly to my machine via my local network, and while that’s fine and all I was always suspicious that there was some kind of latency going on. I wouldn’t trust time-sensitive actions to such a setup, but I also don’t want to be living with lag.

More Data, More Screens

Since starting Elite Dangerous, I’ve been using EDCopilot which is a third-party app that parses the output files that ED generates. This is a great way for an app to operate, and for a game to behave. EDC knows which system I am in, what ship I’m flying, my inventory, and a whole lot more info that helps the app help me by telling me about important points of interest in any given system I enter, as well as guidance on where to go based on criteria I provide. Of course, being an external app I have to constantly move the cursor from the game to the app on another monitor and back again, unlike GG and the game which were two separate apps on two different devices.

I’ve never met a situation I couldn’t overcomplicate, so I went looking for a small, touch-enabled monitor that I could run from the one display port on my PC that wasn’t in use and found this Prechen 12.3″ 1920×720 10-point-touch mini monitor.

In the Year of our Lord 2025 I’d expect a sideboard monitor like this to be more tablet-like but without the autonomy of an actual tablet, but no. This is a pretty thicc unit and it has some heft. It’s basically a solid rectangle, with 2 USB-C ports and 1 HDMI port on the left, and a bunch of buttons and a headphone jack on the right. It comes with some USB cables, some HDMI cables, a laughably basic stand, and the monitor itself.

At 1920×720 it’s got a good amount of horizontal real estate, certainly enough to fit two windows side by side. Here I have Spanch.co.uk in a browser on the left (for exobiology in ED) and EDCopilot on the right. This was just a test, and I didn’t get to actually use this configuration, but everything fits well enough. The only issue is that me being Old(tm), the resolution does make smaller elements difficult to see. EDCopilot can use text-to-speech so I don’t need to really read everything it offers, but websites can get cramped when relegated to 1/2 of the screen space.

One Mouse; Multiple Meeses

While the touch-screen works fine (I had to dig into the why-on-a-desktop-system pen & touch control panel to ID this screen as touch-enabled to get it to work), the core issue remains: I would need to get my cursor out of the game and over to the screen because touch-enabled or no, I only have one clicky arrow…or do I?

A quick spin ’round the old search engine brought MouseMux to my attention. This app can allow multiple people using multiple inputs to have their own cursor on a Windows machine.

Each cursor can be set to a different Windows Cursor (if you lived through the 90’s you know all about changing mouse cursors) or can use the default pointer with a small colored block in the corner to differentiate which cursor is which. Each cursor can be given a name, can be locked to a specific monitor, and one can even create macros on a per-cursor basis. I admit that this is a super niche setup, but the app works as advertised; I can keep my mouse-based cursor inside the game and have a touch-based cursor operating on the sideboard, and don’t have to worry about the game (or any other app) losing focus at critical times.

As I write this, I have reinstalled GameGlass and the sideboard is displaying the Elite Dangerous “Exploration” premium shard through a web browser in application mode. While this works, it’s actually not optimal because the GG dashboard doesn’t stretch the width of the monitor, and the fonts are rather small. I can use the GameGlass Forge to create a shard that takes up the entire 1920×720 space and uses the Elite Dangerous data-fed components that GG offers, but I cannot alter those components in any way, like to make the font larger. I should ping the GG developers somehow and see if A) there’s a way, or B) if it can be something that can be added to Forge.

Of course, I don’t have to leave this over to game-time. I can use it to house a music app, a video app (albeit a small one), or maybe even move my Discord and Mastodon clients down there if I want to use their “home monitor” for something else for a while. Ideally, I’d move my socials to the small monitor and use the full-sized monitor for EDCopilot and other tools, but then I’d need another physical mouse to have a dedicated cursor on that screen; it’s not entirely out of the question, really, so I’ll have to play around with everything to find the most optimal setup that justifies keeping this tiny touch-screen monitor.