Dual-Boxing World of Warcraft with Octopus

Download octopus1.3.2

Octopus is a program that allows you to run, view and control multiple applications simultaneously over a network or on a single computer. Though Octopus can be used for nearly any application and configured many ways, this article will focus on running two instances of a game, in this case World of Warcraft, on a single computer.

Getting Started

The following steps assume that you already have an installed copy of Octopus (version 1.3.2 is used for this demonstration) and World of Warcraft. You will also need two active World of Warcraft accounts, and while it is entirely legal to own and play multiple WoW accounts, it is not legal to buy, sell, trade or even use another account other then your own.

NOTE: Vista users may need to launch this as administrator if there appears to be problems with Octopus not saving configuration settings properly.

Configuring Octopus

Step One: Open Octopus, select the Options tab at the top right of the window and then view the options sub-menu from the list on the left. Fill in the “Auto start server” box and you also have the option of opening Octopus minimized and close to the systray.

Step Two: Select the Client tab, then the Windows sub-menu. Fill in the “Auto add windows” and “Substring match” box,  then fill in the “Window title” field with warcraft, or what ever else you would like the wow windows to be named. Last on this page fill in the “Process name” field with case sensitive  name of the executable file in your wow folder without the .exe extension, lowercase wow by default.

Step Three: Select the “Games” sub-menu. Here is where you name the two instances of wow that Octopus will run and specify where wow.exe is on your computer. Click the “new” button on the right hand side of the window then in the “tag” field enter the name of that instance, the names can be anything you choose, in this case WOW Master and WOW Slave. In “Path” field the location of the .exe file for that instance ( the “…” can be used to get the path as if you were opening a file)  then rinse and repeat for the second. In this guide the two instances use a single copy of the warcraft software installed to the default location on the C Drive. As you create these they will appear in the upper portion of the window for you to see.

Step Four: Selected the “Server” tab, then the “maximize” sub-menu. Here is where you will specify where wow will be displayed on your monitor(s). First click the “new” button on the right of the screen and create two entries with the same tags used in the step above, here we keep using WOW Master and WOW Slave. Next you will need to fill in the X and Y fields for the “Region”, these values specify where the bottom left hand corner of each window will open.  to the right of the X and Y values are Width and Height, these values define the dimensions of each window that will open in terms of pixels. In the case is this demonstration we are using a single 22″ monitor with the resolution set at 1680×1050.  With the coordinates and dimensions shown below the two windows will displayed side by side in two windows of 840×1050 occupying the entire screen. If you have two monitors you can change these values to open each copy of wow full screen on each monitor though this is more demanding on your system and my cause a lot of video lag. If you want to check your own resolution right click on your desktop, click properties then the settings tab at the top of the window, in this window you can also mouse over the displays to see their coordinates. The bottom left of your primary monitor is (0,0)by default, a monitor to the left has a negative X value and one to the right would have a positive X value. Until you run octopus for the first time you wont be able to see how it will open, keep this step in mind for possible fine tuning later on. If you do choose to display wow on two separate monitors with different resolutions you will need to install a second copy of wow to have each instance run at a different resolution. Any change made to resolutions after opening wow with Octopus will cause wow to go full screen on your main monitor.