In the fun new world of lockdowns, pandemics and remote work sometimes you want to share a whole screen you don't have. Perhaps a quiz PowerPoint you want to share but keep your only monitor for managing the call and chat. What you really need is a virtual screen, in older versions of Windows there was a way to force a phantom VGA output

The procedure prior to Windows 10 was the following:

Right-click on the desktop and select "Screen Resolution" or "Display Settings"

Click the "Detect" next to the main monitor

Choose "Another display not detected" -> Multiple displays -> Try to connect anyway on VGA

This will add a second virtual monitor which you can then configure as a real monitor

but that has been removed.

Luckily Windows 10 added Indirect Display Drivers(IDD) which allow you to add a virtual monitor to your system without any additional hardware. This is mainly designed to send the screen content through USB, Ethernet or other means ¹.

Happily someone has done the work and written a driver to give you a virtual 1920x1080 (or whatever resolution) screen you can share through any collaboration app that can screen share. As a byproduct of their cool sounding screen over USB to android software they also released the standalone driver:

Here is the procedure to add a virtual monitor to your system (Windows 10 Only!)

Download our virtual display driver from https://www.amyuni.com/downloads/usbmmidd_v2.zip

Unpack the zip file to an empty folder, e.g. c:\temp\usbmmidd_v2

Make sure you read the License.txt file as with any other software product

Open a command prompt window as Administrator (you cannot add a device to your system unless you "Run As Administrator")

Run the following commands:

cd c:\temp\usbmmid_v2 (or whatever destination folder you chose)

deviceinstaller64 install usbmmidd.inf usbmmidd

Make sure you see the message that the drivers are signed by Amyuni Technologies Inc. This is a confirmation that the drivers went through Microsoft driver signing procedure and are virus free

deviceinstaller64 enableidd 1

You can run the last command up to four times in order to add 4 virtual monitors to Windows 10. If you are on a 32-bit system, replace "deviceinstaller64" by "deviceinstaller"

Full Instructions

If you want to read more about IDD look here at Microsoft or to the Sample Github code.

I have tested this with both Skype and Facebook Messenger to run video call pub quiz and it worked really well both times. I felt the need to document this as solutions like Window Powertoys Fancyzones, Display Fusion and the others I tried were perfectly able to split up windows into whatever pattern but these did not show up as separate shareable screens to Skype/Teams etc.

I used PowerPoint presentation mode to get easy controls on my real screen and if you are looking for remote quizzes (at least while some of New Zealand is in Level 4 or 3 lockdown) check out the Believe It Or Not Quiz Facebook Page.