For more details, please review the detailed change log.

This beta, nick-named “Conradine”, marks the last official Psychtoolbox release in the Version 3.0.9 series. We may or may not fix critical bugs after this release, but most likely we won’t.

This is the last release to support MacOSX on Apple PowerPC hardware, the last one to support MS-Windows 2000, and the last to support Matlab versions older than V7.4 aka R2007a

All systems:

• PsychPortAudio: Fix sound output with dithering enabled on current 64-Bit Linux and all other future 64-Bit platforms. There was a bug in the underlying PortAudio library which caused strong white noise with dithering enabled on a 64-Bit runtime. In low latency / high timing precision output mode, dithering is disabled by default, so most demos and scripts weren’t affected. BasicSoundOutputDemo however worked in “normal mode” with dithering on by default, so the actual sound output was drowned in strong static white noise.

• Eyelink: Fix EyelinkFixationWindow function for use with Matlab R2012a, which is case sensitive and treats wrong case in function names as errors, instead of warnings.

• PsychHID: Add keyboard event ring buffer support. Once a keyboard queue for a specific keyboard(-like) device (mouse buttons on a mouse, joystick/gamepad buttons, etc. are treated as “mini keyboards”) has been created and started via KbQueueCreate and KbQueueStart all events (button press and release) are not only recorded between invocations of KbQueueCheck, but they are now additionally recorded in a ring buffer that can hold up to 10000 press- and release events. The buffer sequentially records all events, including a timestamp and potential additional data. The buffer can be emptied (“flushed”), checked and read out with the new functions KbEventFlush(), KbEventAvail() and KbEventGet() independent of the old KbQueueXXX functions. This should allow more convenient access to recorded subject responses, scanner triggers etc. without the need to constantly poll for key state via KbCheck, GetMouse, GamePad etc. Each queue and thereby each individual keyboard has its own buffer (although you can only address one keyboard or mouse on windows due to operating system limitations, and only have one keyboard queue on OSX due to limitations of our current PsychHID driver, so multiple queues for multiple devices is only really useful on Linux). KbQueueDemo demonstrates how to use keyboard event buffers.

• moglmorpher: Add more strict parameter checking to subfunction moglmorpher('AddMesh') to catch some coding errors in user scripts instead of aborting with puzzling error messages.

• Screen: Allow to disable sound decoding of Quicktime movies during playback on Windows and OSX, to match behavior on Linux and Windows when used with the GStreamer playback engine. Precisely: Sound decoding is not really disabled, as Quicktime does not allow that. Instead sound output is just muted. This way scripts behave in a compatible and consistent way, irrespective of playback engine, but users of Quicktime won’t get the benefits of reduced processor load and sound resource utilization.

• Various performance improvements in the mex files and small bug fixes.

• Various improvements to color correction and gamma correction routines by David Brainard.

Linux:

• Screen: Update low-level GPU detection support to work with the latest year 2012 AMD GPU’s, ie., the “Southern Islands” and “Trinity” GPU families, better known by their marketing names “Radeon HD 7000” and “AMD Fusion”. This allows our special bag of neat low-level tricks on Linux to also work with these new models of graphics hardware and expose some special features not found on other systems.

• PsychHID: Fix default keyboard selection on Linux on some Laptops, which report the VideoBus as a keyboard. If no specific keyboard device index is given to any of the keyboard functions, PsychHID uses a heuristic to try to select the “default keyboard” as a reasonable choice. As there isn’t any real “default keyboard” on any operating system, the heuristic is a “best effort” approach which can go wrong on exotic hardware setups. On Linux, some Laptops expose some control buttons related to graphics hardware as a “one button keyboard” and the heuristic sometimes chose those buttons as default keyboard - clearly not what one would expect. Now the heuristic skips those button devices labeled as VideoBus. PsychHID on Linux selects the default device by name pattern matching, selecting the first device whose name string sounds like a real keyboard instead of something exotic. PsychHID on MacOSX selects the first HID device labelled as “HID Usage value keyboard class”, so the order in which keyboards get plugged into the computer - or detected at boot up, or the location where they get connected - determines which is the default keyboard. On Windows, PsychHID can’t discriminate keyboards due to operating system limitations, therefore it can’t choose the “wrong one” ;-)