Hi Brian,
when did you last test PTB-3? I guess not within at least
the last year?
The low quality text rendering on Windows has been fixed
way over a year ago in PTB 'beta', the only recommended
version of PTB-3.
If you experience bugs in the Windows version,
we're interested in hearing from you. Reporting them
is the only way to get them fixed.
I can't think of a major area where PTB-3 is less compatible
with the Windows OS than PTB-2, so major incompatibilities
would be interesting to know as well. PTB-3 added many enhancements
to all core modules to be more robust against flaws in
the Windows OS, so it should actually handle such
flaws better. However, PTB-3 executes many built-in
correctness tests which weren't present in PTB-2, so
it may happen that many silent failures or problems due
to operating system bugs or driver bugs
that one couldn't easily notice with PTB-2 now cause
prominent errors and warning messages. That is
a feature, not a bug.
Unless you are perfectly happy with the functionality
PTB-2 offered for your purpose and certain that you
can stick with your setup for a long time, it is
better to switch to PTB-3 - or at least write new
experiment code only with PTB-3:
PTB-2 is no longer maintained in any way, so if you
run into trouble or bugs with it, none of the developers
will help you, whereas PTB-3 is constantly improved.
I am not even sure if PTB-2 still fully works with current
Matlab releases.
If you stick with PTB-2 you will miss out a lot of
improvements beyond transparent offscreen windows,
which is of course fine if PTB-2 was good enough for
all your needs.
The first thing to read would be the PDF file inside
the PsychDocumentation/ subfolder which highlights
some of the differences between PTB-2 and PTB-3,
especially the usage and mechanism of the Screen('Flip')
command. And then there are many demos in the
PsychDemos folder to serve as examples...
best,
-mario
--- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, Brian Levinthal <brian.levinthal@...> wrote:
>
> There are many differences between PTB2 and 3 (most are covered at the
> psych toolbox website). There is really only one big difference, but it
> ends up causing a lot of problems with old code. Psychtoolbox 3 uses
> your video card (whereas psychtoolbox 2 does not). As a result,
> displays are handled differently. When you copy an off-screen window to
> the main window, it is actually copied to a separate buffer which is NOT
> displayed immediately. To see the contents of this buffer, you have to
> use the "flip" command:
>
> Screen('Flip',mainWindow); %put in your main window pointer variable
>
> Now you'd see the display. When you flip the buffer, any subsequent
> copy-window commands deal with the "other" buffer (the one you can't
> see). So in order to show a display, you must first copy all of the
> relevant off-screen windows, and then once it is ready to show the
> display, use the 'Flip' command. Type "screen flip?" in the matlab
> console for more details.
>
> Psychtoolbox 3 is not as fully compatible with windows operating systems
> as its predecessor, so you may experience bugs that were not present in
> your previous code. In particular, you will notice that text does not
> display properly in the new psychtoolbox. It is fine for Mac OSX, but
> not for windows (for some reason...).
>
> There are some benefits to using the new toolbox, including the ability
> to use transparent offscreen windows, but if you are using a windows
> machine you should probably stick to version 2 if possible.
>
> -Brian
>
> He Jibo wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > Do you happened to know the difference
> > between psychotoolbox 2 and 3? I just installed psychotoolbox 3, but
> > the code I made in psychotoolbox 2 do not work any more. What changes
> > shall I make to use the code under psychotoolbox 3?
> >
> > Thank you so much !
> >
> > He Jibo
> > hejibo@... <mailto:hejibo@...>
> > jibohe2@... <mailto:jibohe2@...>
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------
> > He Jibo
> > Department of Psychology,
> > Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> > University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign,
> > 603 East Daniel St.,
> > Champaign, IL 61820
> > Tel: 217-244-4461(office)
> > 217-244-6763(lab)
> > Email: hejibo@... <mailto:hejibo@...>
> > Zsa Zsa Gabor - "I'm a great housekeeper. I get divorced. I keep the
> > house."
>
>
> He Jibo wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > Do you happened to know the difference between psychotoolbox 2 and 3?
> > I just installed psychotoolbox 3, but the code I made in psychotoolbox
> > 2 do not work any more. What changes shall I make to use the code
> > under psychotoolbox 3?
> >
> > Thank you so much !
> >
> > He Jibo
> > hejibo@... <mailto:hejibo@...>
> > jibohe2@... <mailto:jibohe2@...>
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------
> > He Jibo
> > Department of Psychology,
> > Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> > University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign,
> > 603 East Daniel St.,
> > Champaign, IL 61820
> > Tel: 217-244-4461(office)
> > 217-244-6763(lab)
> > Email: hejibo@... <mailto:hejibo@...>
> > Zsa Zsa Gabor - "I'm a great housekeeper. I get divorced. I keep the
> > house."
>