This update, apart from the usual bug fixes (mostly for broken graphics card drivers, but also for a few ptb bugs) mainly improves support for high precision drawing and display of visual stimuli. Another major part is consistent support of serial port access for all operating systems and runtime environments. And then there are lots of improvements to single functions.

Hardware support

• Experimental support for the basic functions of the USB 1024-LS digital I/O box on Apple OS/X. This is implemented but untested – no feedback was received by any of the persons who wanted to try it.

• Support for Cedrus response boxes of the RBx30 series and compatible XiD devices. See “help CedrusResponseBox” for how to use the new CedrusResponseBox command to operate and query the box. Please note that the current driver only “sort of works” for the basic features of the box, although a lot of time has been spent by multiple people trying to make it work. More advanced features are implemented, but their reliability is low enough to render them useless for most purpose. Basic key queries and button event queries work, so you can actually get responses from your subjects. Queries of the built-in timers work, but due to some interesting design flaws in the protocol, i’m not sure what they should be good for, unless you can get external baseline signals from the TTL trigger input ports. Setup, control and query of the TTL i/o port sometimes (in about one third of all trials) works under some random and unrepeatable circumstances, so good luck if you want to use them. I am still waiting since 30th of April for any helpful comments or suggestions from Cedrus developer support about how one can make their devices more cooperative with software other than their own. Thanks to Jenny Read, Cambridge Research Systems, Jon Peirce, Thomas Tanner and Tobias Wolf for suggestions, code examples, testing or sharing the pain.

• Improved support for the EGI/Netstation EEG system. Our old NetStation control function apparently only worked on PowerPC based Macintosh computers. The new driver works on all Apple Macintosh computers and should also work on Intel PC under Windows and Linux. Thanks to Gergely Csibra and Zhao Fan for fixing this.

• The pnet mex file for TCP/UDP/IP support has been recompiled to allow for lower communication latency. This should improve timing for at least NetStation and the iViewX eyetrackers.

• Serial port support: This update contains the first release of “IOPort”, a new cross-platform driver for control of Input/Output ports. The driver works with Matlab and Octave on all supported operating systems OSX, Linux and Windows. This initial release provides unified support for serial ports, both native ones and serial ports emulated over USB protocol or other protocols. Future versions of the driver are intended to provide support for other types of I/O ports, e.g., parallel ports. As of now, the driver is only used by the CedrusResponseBox M-File, but long-term all code should be switched to this unified driver, e.g., the PR-650 photometer routines etc, so we can get rid of special solutions like PsychSerial or SerialComm.

• Mouse wheel support: On OS/X the function GetMouseWheel() allows query of the state/movement of the mouse wheels of wheel mice. However, this seems to occassionally crash after multiple “clear all” -> run script -> “clear all” cycles for yet unresolved reasons.

Improvements to Screen – The Visuals

Most improvements are related to the image processing pipeline. While the detailed documentation is contained in the files referenced below, most functions are accessed and controlled by the PsychImaging function and the basic help for how to use them can be found there. Demos mentioned below demonstrate this stuff in “real world” scripts.

• Much improved HDR/High precision drawing support, including improved GPU capabilities detection, especially on Apple OSX: Psychtoolbox should support drawing of arbitrary color values, even ones with negative signs, on OS X as well. In the past, this feature was only available on MS-Windows and Linux due to some software design restriction in all versions of OS X. PTB can now detect such restrictions and enable a special internal workaround solution that achieves the same without relying on the operating systems support. The ability to draw “negative” color values is mostly useful for subtracting color from a given framebuffer image in combination with alpha-blending, e.g., for fast and efficient drawing of large numbers of gabor patches or superimposed patches. Examples of this technique are demonstrated in BitsPlusPlusAdditiveBlendingForLinearSuperpositionTutorial or GarboriumDemo. There is also a new but not fully finished test script HighColorPrecisionDrawingTest. It allows to get some basic measures of the accuracy (how closely does the drawn color/luminance match the requested one) of drawing commands. Some test cases sometimes give worse numbers than they should due to some quirks in some graphics cards which are unrelated to accuracy but confounded with it. E.g., if the majority of test results tells you that your system can draw with 16 bits of precision, but one or two tests tell you it only has 6 bits or 0 bits of precision, then you can assume that the 16 bits is the more correct number and the other one is the outlier.

• This functionality is mostly controlled by the special floatprecision flags of Screen('MakeTexture',...) for drawing of high precision textures, and the Screen('ColorRange',....) command for drawing of other primitives and control over the required precision, value range and clamping behaviour of such drawing operations. General control of framebuffer precision is again done via PsychImaging and its subfunctions.

• High precision display device drivers for most common devices, and a test to test them:
• CRS Bits++ in all modes – Detail improvements: Support for automatic gamma correction in Mono++ and Color++ modes (see below) and for overlay windows in Mono++ mode. Some automatic fixes for some broken graphics drivers as well.
• VideoSwitcher by Xiangru Li et al. – A video attenuator device with active amplifiers, useable with standard RGB monitors for high precision luminance output, including a single TTL trigger output port. See help for PsychVideoSwitcher.
• Generic video attenuator support via Lookup table transforms: Allows to drive any attenuator style device. You create some Luminance to RGB lookup table for your device in a device specific manner. Our driver performs automatic mapping of luminance values to proper RGB values from the table. Supports devices with up to 16 bit luminance resolution.
• PseudoGray shader aka BitStealing: An algorithm that tries to squeeze out a few extra bits of luminance reproduction on standard 8 bits per color component graphics cards: See help for CreatePseudoGrayLUT
• ATI 10 bpc framebuffer refinements: See help for PsychHelperCreateARGB2101010RemapCLUT and for PsychtoolboxKernelDriver
• BrightSideHDR refined: Support for the DR37-P high dynamic range display from BrightSide also received a few detail improvements.

The BitsPlusPlusAdditiveBlendingForLinearSuperpositionTutorial currently demonstrates how to enable and use the different drivers in its source code. While this script used to only demonstrate mode, it its now more generic and will need a new name. The HighPrecisionLuminanceOutputDriversImagingPipelineTest tests accuracy of the different output drivers, except for the CRS Bits++ which has its own test script like in the past.

• Color management integrated into all opmodes, e.g., gamma correction: This applies only in conjunction with use of the imaging pipeline. It should work with all HDR / high precision output drivers (see above). Read help for PsychColorCorrection for an overview. Currently only a simple gamma correction is implemented, but this is easily extensible.

• High quality spatial display calibration and geometric undistortion routines, contributed by the Banks Vision Lab at University of California, Berkeley. Read help DisplayUndistortionBVL for an overview of functionality and usage of the calibration procedure. Their website also contains some instructions. The current help text was mostly written by me, so i’m the one to blame for sloppy explanations and they are the ones to praise for high quality calibration routines ;-)

• Some new PsychImaging subfunctions, e.g., dynamic selection of processing ROI: You can restrict image processing to some subregion of the display to save computation time if you need high redraw rates on high resolution displays, your graphics card is too slow and the stimulus only covers a fraction of the display area.