This is kleinerm's git repository for development of Psychtoolbox-3. Regular end users should stay away from it, unless instructed by him otherwise, and use the official Psychtoolbox-3 GitHub page or distribution system for production releases.
Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 Beta update "Virtuality" SP3 was released at 13th July 2023. As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository. The release tag is “3.0.19.3”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:
Octave: Octave 7.3 is required on MS-Windows. Octave 8.2 is required on macOS, but Octave 6.3 - 8.1 may also continue to work on macOS (assumed, but untested).
The macOS 10 (aka Mac OSX) OS family, macOS 11 and macOS 12 operating systems will probably continue to work, but are now untested and officially unsupported and unsupportable. Running Psychtoolbox on Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M2, ...) is not officially supported by this release. Visual stimulation timing will be totally broken on Apple Silicon Macs, as well as some other features. It is our understanding that currently no vision science toolkit exists that could provide any reliable or trustworthy operation on macOS for Apple Silicon. On Intel based Macs, Psychtoolbox likely continues to be the only toolkit with somewhat trustworthy visual stimulation timing on most Intel Mac configurations if configured correctly for use with a properly installed PsychtoolboxKernelDriver.
Procedural shaders: Remove corrective offsets for hardware texture sampling, as it may be no longer helpful, but harmful, due to changes in gpu hardware drivers on all operating systems. See GitHub issue #800, reported by user @qx1147. Tests on AMD, NVidia and Intel gpu's under Linux, Windows and macOS suggest this is the right thing to do now. This means that the centers of procedurally generated stimuli like Gabor patches or sine gratings will shift by 0.5 pixels on the screen.
Highlights:
Switch lightly tested and supported macOS version from macOS 12 Monterey to macOS 13 Ventura. Older macOS versions are untested and unsupported from now on.
All:
The new OpenXR driver has now also been tested with the HTC Vive Pro Eye and the associated "Vive Wand" hand controllers with Valve SteamVR 1.25.7 on Windows and Linux, and with Monado on Linux with "vive" and "survive" backends as OpenXR runtimes on (recommended going forward) Ubuntu Linux 22.04.2-LTS. Past successfull Linux tests were on - no longer tested - Ubuntu 20.04.6-LTS. The driver now also works with Octave 7.3 on MS-Windows.
DaqAInScanContinue: Try to fix live data retrieval on USB-1208FS when using more than one analog input channel. It could cause data loss or data to channel mapping misalignment when DaqAInScanContinue(daq, options, 1); was used with more than one input channel. Cfe. https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/sampling-frequency-of-analogue-input/4780/10 This is untested due to lack of hardware. Unpaid work time spent trying to diagnose and fix this: 4 hours.
Snd: Update help text, remove Octave specific quirks - no longer needed. Add a new function Snd('OldStyle'); to allow selection of old style audio output path on the fly, as addition to the former static only selection by creating a config file. Allows use of the old output path which simply uses Matlabs or Octaves sound() function, which is now available also on all supported Octave 5+ versions.
Make CalDemo work with graphics hardware gamma lut sizes other than 256 slots. Instead use the size of the actual luts stored in the loaded calibration file.
Try to fix and improve CalibrateMonSpd and related functions: It now also works on standard display setups other than visual stimulators from CRS and VPixx. Plus tons of bug fixes. Also it now also supports other colorimeters than the PR650. See the following link for the mess this tries to fix:
Improve Eyelink('ImageTransfer'): Allow to pass in image matrices from Matlab/Octave, e.g., as read from image files via imread(), or retrieved from PTB drawing commands via Screen('GetImage'), or computed in scripts. Before this, it was only possible to load uncompressed BMP image files. Also fix the - previously broken - demos EyelinkPictureCustomCalibration and EyeLinkPicture. Untested on actual Eyelink, only tested in simulation due to lack of hardware.
Procedural shaders: Remove corrective offsets for hardware texture sampling, as it may be no longer helpful, but harmful, due to changes in gpu hardware drivers on all operating systems. See GitHub issue #800, reported by user @qx1147.
Minor bug fixes, documentation updates and improvements.
Linux:
Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.
PsychOpenHMDVR: Fix crash in 'GetTrackingState' if VR controllers are not present or are not supported. Also add HTC Vive Pro Eye specific undistortion shaders. Other minor improvements.
Eyelink: The mex files for Linux were upgraded to now use and require the SR-Research eyelink_core SDK and runtime version 2.0, instead of the old v1.9 runtimes. To run the new mex files you either need to manually set a symlink for mapping the new runtime name to the old runtime library name. Or install the recent v2 runtime from SR-Research. It is recommended to upgrade, as the new runtime contains nice bug fixes. E.g., the runtime no longer hangs if no Eyelink tracker hardware is connected, iow. Eyelink dummy mode fallback can now work. The most easy way to upgrade Ubuntu or Debian to the latest SDK is from a terminal via the following command-line: sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://apt.sr-research.com/SRResearch_key ; sudo add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64] https://apt.sr-research.com S RResearch main' ; sudo apt install eyelinkcore
or you follow the setup instructions at https://www.sr-research.com/support/docs.php?topic=linuxsoftware
Windows:
Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.
The OpenXR driver now also works with Octave 7.3, in addition to Matlab.
macOS:
macOS Ventura (currently version 13.4.1) is the only officially lightly tested and supported macOS operating system, and only for 64-Bit Intel Macs. Support and testing for macOS 12 Monterey has ended, but macOS 12 is assumed to continue to work as before.
Upgrade to the brand new 64-Bit GNU/Octave 8.2 from HomeBrew is recommended for running Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.3 on Octave. Other Octave versions from the Octave 6.3/6.4 and 7.x series, Octave 8.1, or future Octave 8.x versions, may work as well, but no guarantees for anything other than Octave 8.2 from HomeBrew.
Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.
PTB Beta updated to 3.0.19.3
Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 Beta update "Virtuality" SP3 was released at 13th July 2023. As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository. The release tag is “3.0.19.3”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.3
Compatibility changes wrt. Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.2:
Octave: Octave 7.3 is required on MS-Windows. Octave 8.2 is required on macOS, but Octave 6.3 - 8.1 may also continue to work on macOS (assumed, but untested).
Recommended operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04.2-LTS Linux, MS-Windows 10 22H2, macOS 13.4
The macOS 10 (aka Mac OSX) OS family, macOS 11 and macOS 12 operating systems will probably continue to work, but are now untested and officially unsupported and unsupportable. Running Psychtoolbox on Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M2, ...) is not officially supported by this release. Visual stimulation timing will be totally broken on Apple Silicon Macs, as well as some other features. It is our understanding that currently no vision science toolkit exists that could provide any reliable or trustworthy operation on macOS for Apple Silicon. On Intel based Macs, Psychtoolbox likely continues to be the only toolkit with somewhat trustworthy visual stimulation timing on most Intel Mac configurations if configured correctly for use with a properly installed PsychtoolboxKernelDriver.
Procedural shaders: Remove corrective offsets for hardware texture sampling, as it may be no longer helpful, but harmful, due to changes in gpu hardware drivers on all operating systems. See GitHub issue #800, reported by user @qx1147. Tests on AMD, NVidia and Intel gpu's under Linux, Windows and macOS suggest this is the right thing to do now. This means that the centers of procedurally generated stimuli like Gabor patches or sine gratings will shift by 0.5 pixels on the screen.
Highlights:
All:
The new OpenXR driver has now also been tested with the HTC Vive Pro Eye and the associated "Vive Wand" hand controllers with Valve SteamVR 1.25.7 on Windows and Linux, and with Monado on Linux with "vive" and "survive" backends as OpenXR runtimes on (recommended going forward) Ubuntu Linux 22.04.2-LTS. Past successfull Linux tests were on - no longer tested - Ubuntu 20.04.6-LTS. The driver now also works with Octave 7.3 on MS-Windows.
DaqAInScanContinue: Try to fix live data retrieval on USB-1208FS when using more than one analog input channel. It could cause data loss or data to channel mapping misalignment when
DaqAInScanContinue(daq, options, 1);was used with more than one input channel. Cfe. https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/sampling-frequency-of-analogue-input/4780/10 This is untested due to lack of hardware. Unpaid work time spent trying to diagnose and fix this: 4 hours.Snd: Update help text, remove Octave specific quirks - no longer needed. Add a new function
Snd('OldStyle');to allow selection of old style audio output path on the fly, as addition to the former static only selection by creating a config file. Allows use of the old output path which simply uses Matlabs or Octavessound()function, which is now available also on all supported Octave 5+ versions.Make CalDemo work with graphics hardware gamma lut sizes other than 256 slots. Instead use the size of the actual luts stored in the loaded calibration file.
Try to fix and improve CalibrateMonSpd and related functions: It now also works on standard display setups other than visual stimulators from CRS and VPixx. Plus tons of bug fixes. Also it now also supports other colorimeters than the PR650. See the following link for the mess this tries to fix:
https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/single-row-entries-in-theclut-during-calibration-with-a-spectroradiometer-calmonspd/5033
Improve
Eyelink('ImageTransfer'): Allow to pass in image matrices from Matlab/Octave, e.g., as read from image files viaimread(), or retrieved from PTB drawing commands viaScreen('GetImage'), or computed in scripts. Before this, it was only possible to load uncompressed BMP image files. Also fix the - previously broken - demos EyelinkPictureCustomCalibration and EyeLinkPicture. Untested on actual Eyelink, only tested in simulation due to lack of hardware.Procedural shaders: Remove corrective offsets for hardware texture sampling, as it may be no longer helpful, but harmful, due to changes in gpu hardware drivers on all operating systems. See GitHub issue #800, reported by user @qx1147.
Minor bug fixes, documentation updates and improvements.
Linux:
Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.
PsychOpenHMDVR: Fix crash in 'GetTrackingState' if VR controllers are not present or are not supported. Also add HTC Vive Pro Eye specific undistortion shaders. Other minor improvements.
Eyelink: The mex files for Linux were upgraded to now use and require the SR-Research eyelink_core SDK and runtime version 2.0, instead of the old v1.9 runtimes. To run the new mex files you either need to manually set a symlink for mapping the new runtime name to the old runtime library name. Or install the recent v2 runtime from SR-Research. It is recommended to upgrade, as the new runtime contains nice bug fixes. E.g., the runtime no longer hangs if no Eyelink tracker hardware is connected, iow. Eyelink dummy mode fallback can now work. The most easy way to upgrade Ubuntu or Debian to the latest SDK is from a terminal via the following command-line:
sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://apt.sr-research.com/SRResearch_key ; sudo add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64] https://apt.sr-research.com S RResearch main' ; sudo apt install eyelinkcoreor you follow the setup instructions at https://www.sr-research.com/support/docs.php?topic=linuxsoftwareWindows:
Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.
The OpenXR driver now also works with Octave 7.3, in addition to Matlab.
macOS:
macOS Ventura (currently version 13.4.1) is the only officially lightly tested and supported macOS operating system, and only for 64-Bit Intel Macs. Support and testing for macOS 12 Monterey has ended, but macOS 12 is assumed to continue to work as before.
Upgrade to the brand new 64-Bit GNU/Octave 8.2 from HomeBrew is recommended for running Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.3 on Octave. Other Octave versions from the Octave 6.3/6.4 and 7.x series, Octave 8.1, or future Octave 8.x versions, may work as well, but no guarantees for anything other than Octave 8.2 from HomeBrew.
Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.
Enjoy!