Installing it
If you get a download or a boxed disk then you will get an installer which is a standard windows exe installer app. You can install the app anywhere on the PC but I would recommend putting it into a place that has several gigs of free space on it for all of the accumulated art. ViewingDale stores its art in files under the apps main directory. You can divert this to a different place by editing the configuration file but thats not usual.
Before you install its a very good idea to uninstall the trial version that you might have downloaded. The two are not compatible.
When it is installed it will normally put a launch icon on the desktop and a shortcut in the start menu. When you run the app it will load the last map you were looking at or the index page for the first time run. The index page is blue with some circles and text on it.
The circles are links and they will take you to other maps such as the island map that it comes with or the help pages which are all in ViewingDale format. When you see this page its quite possible that your circles are not circular but elliptical and it all looks a bit squashed. This would be true particularly on wide screen monitors. We need to fix this.
ViewingDale works is real world scaling. To get that you must calibrate it to your monitor and this is done by measuring accurately your monitors drawable area in mm. Thats right to the edge of the screen not the window its running in. If you do this and have the width and height then you can use the "Start" button and hit the System Settings button and then the "Screen Width in mm" and "Screen Height in mm" and enter the values in. When finished the page should have exactly circular jump icons on the index page.
If you happen to be using a large screen or a small screen such as either a projector or a micro tablet PC then it might be a good idea to enter the widths or heights in stages as it will change the screen progressively each time and it might be too squished if you go in one giant step. If you really get stuck then you can close it, edit the configuration file and restart the app. If you are using a projector down onto a table with miniatures then its an especially good idea to enter correct values as then all the maps will always be the correct scale for your miniatures with no more scaling - ever.
If your running a single desktop over multiple monitors then put in the value for the multiple monitors. The app copes well with spanning over multiple monitors providing your using one graphics card driving them or hardware connected cards in SLI mode or whatever fancy setup nVidia has come up with this year.
You should also check your graphics card specs and enter in the amount of RAM it has on it into the system settings menu item for it too. The more RAM your graphics card has the better it will run. I would say 8Mb is absolute minimum, 32 Mb or more is recommended but having 64 or 256 is better. There's a diminishing advantage beyond about 256Mb.
Thats the setting up done. Ill cover patching up next so we can get that out of the way.
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