Multiple Screens

[realisticphish]

So, I've been playing around with using my HDTV as a secondary display for my MacBook. It's working great, except for one thing: fullscreen. One major goal was to be playing a movie on one screen (the HDTV) while playing a fullscreen game on the laptop (Civ 4 in this case).

Obviously, once the game starts, the secondary monitor dims. Is there some way to split up the monitors, so "fullscreen" won't dim the secondary one?

[realisticphish]

1. as an update

I figured out how to do fullscreen on one of the displays with VLC and DVD Player, and can remove the fullscreen mode for Civ 4, but it's still not what I really want

[struggle4progress]

2. I suspect "fullscreen mode" actually means different things in different contexts:

what it means may depend on the application invoking it (I get different results, for example, in various linux distros running under VirtualBox, depending on whether or not Guest Additions have been installed) and also depends on whether or not it is invoked on the master screen or a secondary screen (invoking on the master loses the menu and icon bars, while invoking on the secondary does not). If some or all of the implementation is left to the application instead of to OSX, results might be buggy or inconsistent: for example, when I invoked fullscreen for Google Chrome on my master screen, it was the webpage alone that came up full screen, without any visible web navigation tools or menu bar or icon bar, which I found rather crappy