Display Connection Emulation

[ectoplasmosis]

I use the 'EDID emulation' features of pro Nvidia/AMD GPUs regularly; on these platforms, this feature emulates a connected display device, so that Windows sees it as as present even if the physical cable/adapter is removed.

Would it be possible to implement such a feature on MacOS?

This would be extremely useful in the pro AV world, where cables are routinely swapped/disconnected whilst an active show project is running, avoiding display reconfiguration.

[waydabber]

This is currently not known to be possible, but I'll look into it. You can do something similar with a virtual display (dummy) standing in between the project and the physical display, but that's a workaround.

[waydabber]

For headless servers you can already use virtual displays (dummies) with the app to create an accelerated desktop of any size.

[TheWojtek]

"Unable to start dummy" on mine, unfortunately.

[waydabber]

Hmm. Can you provide a screenshot? I don't remember having a message like that in the app: :) What Mac model is it?

[TheWojtek]

Actually, it's not a Mac at all. ;)
I run ESXi 7 on a Dell R710 and one of my VMs is a Monterey instance (upgraded from High Sierra) that runs OpenCore in order to bypass the "content caching" limitation introduced in MacOS running in VMs not deployed on Apple hardware.
OC spoofs a Xserve 3,1 - it is very similar in hardware and chipset to the Dell.
Once I try to create a dummy and connect it, the following appears:

[waydabber]

Huhh, right. :) Well, that setup is rather exotic, so I am not sure, never tested that. Dummies don't really work if there is no any kind of GPU acceleration available which is possibly the case with this setup. No real macs like that exist currently and Even real XServes can't run any macOS version (unpatched) supported by the app so this is an use case the app is not really covering. :)