Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3@759f023b at GitHub tag: PTB_Beta-3.0.10.20121009

This is mostly a bug-fix release to deal with various operating system and graphics driver bugs discovered after the last release.

Release Highlights:

All systems:

• The Speak() command is now supported on all operating systems, and made more flexible. Very flexible Linux support via speech dispatcher service added. Basic MS-Windows support added by Vishal Shah from the Pelli lab at NYU. Mac OS support made slightly more flexible.

• Improvements to general graphics driver sync tests to catch some interesting potential future bugs. Some warning clutter removed where it was redundant.

• Enhancements to the PsychPortAudio backed Snd() legacy sound command: Snd() uses PsychPortAudio internally for higher robustness. However, this means that use of Snd() is incompatible with simultaneous use of PsychPortAudio() within the same script. Snd() now notifies you of this, and also falls back to the old Matlab / Octave sound() function, if PsychPortAudio is already in use.

• Some improvements to DKL color functions by David Brainard.

• Make Screen startup more artifact free on setups with OpenGL triple-buffering enabled. So far you have to disable triple-buffering on any graphics driver on any operating system to get PTB to work correctly timing-wise. Or more specifically, you have to refrain from enabling triple-buffering, as triple-buffering is off on almost all graphics drivers and operating systems by default. However, i’ve just submitted patches with improvements to the Intel and Nouveau drivers for Linux. Once the improved drivers will be released, you will be able to use the drivers with triple-buffering enabled on Intel and NVidia graphics cards , and then it will be nice to have a good looking, artifact free start screen.

• Fix for NVidia graphics driver bug on all platforms, which caused output of many errors when using GL_TEXTURE_2D textures in some demos, e.g., BlurredMipMapDemo.

Windows:

• Fix pnet() data reception on 64-Bit Matlab. Certain parameters for data reception could cause it to crash due to a 64-Bit compatibility bug.

• Fix ShowCursor() and HideCursor() on some MS-Windows setups. HideCursor() wasn’t hiding the cursor anymore on some setups for no conceivable reasons, whereas it worked flawlessly on others, without any change of code on our side.

Linux:

• Improved correctness tests and wokarounds for a graphics driver bug on Intel graphics cards under Linux. A bug was introduced into the Intel drivers released after July 2011, which slipped through (my) code review. This could cause too early stimulus onset, earlier than requested via the when parameter of Screen('Flip') - basically the parameter was ignored and flip always happened at start of the next video refresh cycle. Psychtoolbox automatic correctness tests didn’t test for this, so it slipped through ptb’s tests as well :-(. However, the problem was easily detectable by checking the timestamps returned by Screen('Flip'), or in the case of long interstimulus intervals or animations by visual inspection. Psychtoolbox now checks for this type of bugs as well, warns the user and switches to a fallback path to workaround the problem until a graphics driver update fixes the bug for good. A bugfix for the graphics driver has been submitted for inclusion into future Intel graphics driver releases.

• Make Linux Screen() compatible to apitrace utility. apitrace is a tracer for OpenGL applications. Very useful for debugging bugs in OpenGL code. Calling setenv('PSYCH_ALLOW_APITRACE', '1') makes it possible to trace Psychtoolbox execution of OpenGL commands for debugging of hairy bugs in OpenGL code.

• Bugfixes and enhancements to Screen('Resolution') on Linux. It could return stale information after a display resolution switch in some cases.

OSX:

• Bugfix for Screen(‘Resolutions’) on 64-Bit OSX. It crashed 64-Bit Matlab/Octave on OSX when called.

• Catch errors during HID device enumeration and handle them more gracefully by output of a useful error message instead of crashing hard later. This to work around bugs in Apple’s 64-Bit HID Utilities framework (shoddy error handling), and potentially in some OSX HID drivers, e.g., for certain Wacom tablets. A specific tablet model could crash PsychHID by messing with device enumeration, as reported in Issue#62 on Psychtoolbox-3 at GitHub.