My Setup

There's a lot more discussion on good setups over at http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Portal so if you want to get far more detailed than I care to...feel free to take a look. I like to call mine multi-boxing on a budget. A budget, if you happen to have 2 KVMs and 3 PCs handy ;)

General Setup

My basic setup consists of the following hardware and software:

• 2 Desktop PCs
• 1 Dell XPS M1730
• 2 IO Gear DVI KVMs (although only one is specifically required for WoW...the other is used for other purposes)
• 1 USB switcher (to switch my secondary keyboard)
• 3 copies of WoW
• Octopus

If you've looked at http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Portal you'll see that this is a significantly shorter, and in my opinion, far less complicated setup than others may use. One thing they talk about ad nauseum is latency if you're using software to broadcast keystrokes rather than hardware however I've not found this to be an issue at all. Furthermore, it seems a bit silly to compare local LAN latency to that of hitting the internet and the game servers...they're orders of magnitude apart so I wouldn't lose any sleep over it, particularly for the simple purpose of leveling characters.

As you can see...I have a lot of display space. This allows me the freedom to multi-box in several ways. I can run a single copy per machine (which I do)...or I can allocate space and run multiple copies on the same machine at lower resolution. Note that I didn't purchase these 3 monitors for the purpose of WoW...they're actually for work, but...it's not exactly bad to have the option :)

Also note...3 mice, 2 keyboards. I use a mouse to drive each character when they need individual attention such as quest turn-ins, looting items, whatever, but I generally only need one keyboard. Once Octopus is up and running everything should generally be fairly smooth sailing but I do use it to log in on each secondary computer so that I don't have to fiddle with trying to send credentials from the master keyboard...particularly when keys are omitted.

Octopus Setup

Octopus is pretty straightforward to set up.

On the clients...

1.) Go to the client tab and enter the name or IP of the machine on the General subtab.

2.) On the Windows subtab, enter WoW as the process name and check the "Auto add windows" checkbox

3.) Go to the games sub-tab and enter the location of WoW and give it a tag of WoW

On the server...

1.) Go to the client tab and on the Windows subtab, perform step 2 of the client setup. This will allow you to run multiple instances on the same machine if you need to.

2.) Establish your key filtering list...mine are as follows: