Psychtoolbox 3.0.20.2/3 release “Appletizer” SP2/3 🐍

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Happy new year of the Wood Snake!

Psychtoolbox 3.0.20.2 “Appletizer SP2” was released at 1st February 2025.
Update: Psychtoolbox 3.0.20.3 “Appletizer SP3” was released at 3rd February 2025.

The complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.20.3”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:

https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.20.3

This Psychtoolbox release was sponsored by Mathworks under the year 2024/2025
contract for small enhancements and bug fixes.

Compatibility changes wrt. Psychtoolbox 3.0.20.1:

  • None expected. 3.0.20.3 is a tiny tweak to 3.0.20.2, with no compatibility changes to 3.0.20.1. 3.0.20.3 improves reporting of cpu architecture on macOS, so that a Psychtoolbox running with Intel Matlab/Octave via Rosetta2 emulation on a ARM cpu will also be counted as Apple Silicon Mac, not as Intel Mac. This way we’ll have a more accurate picture of the relative ratio of IntelMac vs. Apple Silicon Mac users.

Highlights:

  • None. This release contains minor functional and quality improvements, bug
    fixes, and refinement of license management support for macOS and Windows in
    the run-up to the launch of the actual paid license model / end of free trial
    period.

All:

  • PsychLicenseHandling(): Add auto download and install for LM client libs.
    Detect absence of required license manager client libraries during ‘Setup’ and try
    to auto-download and install the missing crucial libraries.

    This is relevant for non-standard Psychtoolbox installations via GitHub clone or
    checkout, download of source tree zip/tgz files, or maybe even when the deficient
    Matlab Add-On manager will be reenabled and used in a future release, if we are lucky.

    Should fix multiple trouble reports on the forum from both Windows and macOS users, encountered if they download the “wrong” (ie., not recommended for beginners) zip or tar.gz files for a Psychtoolbox release, instead of the recommended zip file.

  • Update license management libraries to Cryptlex Runtime v3.31.2.
    Apart from minor bug fixes, the main improvement is support for system-wide activations on macOS, which should be quite useful for our users on Apple macOS, as one user account on a Apple machine can activate a machine license, and all users on that machine should be able to use it, instead of having to repeat the procedure for each user account on a machine. This was so far only possible on MS-Windows.

  • DrawFormattedText() and DrawFormattedText2(): Improve formatting/layout of Unicode text.
    Make it work with double() encoded unicode under Matlab/Octave with ‘wrapat’ and ‘justifytomax’ layout, and per-word bounding boxes. And with text wrapping.

    Over 8 hours of tinkering, but seems to work better, as tested on Ubuntu 20.04 with Octave 5.2 and Matlab R2024a.

  • PsychtoolboxPostInstallRoutine: Prune pointless Octave path removals.
    These are dead and pointless since a while.

  • Various other smaller refinements, bug fixes and documentation updates.

Linux:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and tested against Matlab R2024b and Octave 5.2 and later.

Windows:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and tested against Matlab R2024b and Octave 7.3.

  • Move all Matlab mexw64 mex files into PsychBasic folder, delete the now unused PsychBasic/MatlabWindowsFilesR2007a subfolder, which is obsolete since a long time, so get rid of it and store the Matlab mex files for Windows in the same location as the Matlab mex files for Linux and macOS - the PsychBasic/ folder. The file extension makes sure everything gets sorted. This may make it possible to reenable “Matlab Toolbox Add-On” MLTBX support sometime in the future, although more work will be needed for that.

  • Screen(): Improve/Fix per-pixel alpha for onscreen window transparency.
    This used to work on WindowsXP, but got broken by some later version of MS-Windows. This change should fix it on Windows 10+, at least on the tested gpu’s. Right now this improvement is limited to Octave, Matlab will follow in the next release if testing with this does not show problems.

macOS:

  • Psychtoolbox was tested against native Matlab R2024b and against native Octave 9.3 from HomeBrew.

  • PsychtoolboxPostInstallRoutine: Raise minimum macOS version check to 10.13. We need at least macOS 10.13 for Intel Macs and macOS 11 for Apple Silicon Macs.

  • Allow system-wide node-locked machine license activations, so only one user has to do the activation, and then all users on that machine can use Psychtoolbox without need to activate per user account.

  • Datapixx mex for Octave/Matlab on macOS Apple Silicon rebuilt against a more recent VPixx release from 2019 instead of 2014. Still outdated, but better than before, to fix possible interop problems of Apple Silicon Macs with VPixx devices. Not yet tested and confirmed to make things work - Awaiting user feedback.

Enjoy!

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