dear andrew
to get the ball rolling, i just added a link to VisionEgg from our Intro page:
http://psychtoolbox.org/intro.html#links
i never know how to organize such sections. suggestions are welcome.
we do all our work in public, sharing sources and ideas, so we'd love
to cooperate with you. i think the most natural way to do it would be
through the psychtoolbox forum, since there are a number of
interested people, eg Ben Singer, among others, who follow the forum
and make significant contributions.
in Mac OS 9 we minimize interruption by raising the processor
priority. I don't know what the best mechanism will be under Mac OS
X. we'll be happy to share our insights, as they accrue, and would be
grateful to hear of progress (including blind alleys to avoid) from
you and others.
best
denis
At 3:05 PM +0930 6/17/02, Andrew Straw wrote:
to get the ball rolling, i just added a link to VisionEgg from our Intro page:
http://psychtoolbox.org/intro.html#links
i never know how to organize such sections. suggestions are welcome.
we do all our work in public, sharing sources and ideas, so we'd love
to cooperate with you. i think the most natural way to do it would be
through the psychtoolbox forum, since there are a number of
interested people, eg Ben Singer, among others, who follow the forum
and make significant contributions.
in Mac OS 9 we minimize interruption by raising the processor
priority. I don't know what the best mechanism will be under Mac OS
X. we'll be happy to share our insights, as they accrue, and would be
grateful to hear of progress (including blind alleys to avoid) from
you and others.
best
denis
At 3:05 PM +0930 6/17/02, Andrew Straw wrote:
>Hi Denis, Allen, and David,
>
>I am writing for a number of reasons concerning the Vision Egg and
>the Psychophysics Toolbox. First, I have some general questions and
>comments:
>
>I would like to invite you to try the latest release to the Vision
>Egg, which is at http://www.visionegg.org/ I feel the complete core
>feature set is now complete, and usability is also significantly
>improved. You can even download the some of the demos as Windows
>binaries that don't require installation of anything.
>
>Because we all share a common interest in generating visual stimuli
>on modern computers, and especially because I believe you are
>embarking on an OpenGL version of PsychToolbox, I think it would be
>a good idea to stay in contact and possibly avoid reinventing of
>wheels.
>
>I would like to ask if you could link to the Vision Egg from the
>Psych Toolbox website? It would be greatly appreciated, and a
>reciprocal link is already in place. My initial announcement to the
>psychtoolbox mailing list announced quite an early version, and the
>many changes since then make it much better. Nevertheless, this is
>not yet release 1.0, which I plan to release once I'm feeling
>confident about the bug-free nature of the code, the documentation
>has improved, and there are more stimuli classes and demos. All that
>being said, I believe I can recommend the Vision Egg for doing
>experiments today and that the core is stabilizing, with no obvious
>omissions or bugs.
>
>Some specific questions/comments:
>
>Now that Matlab has decided they're going to run on Mac OS X, I'm
>sure you will be considering a port of the psychophysics toolbox to
>Mac OS X. I see the greatest challenge as grabbing hold of the CPU
>as was once possible under Mac OS classic's cooperative
>multi-tasking by just not being cooperative. (Although I never dug
>for into the details how the psych toolbox did it.) It does seem to
>me that if a Mac OS X port of the psych toolbox is made, it would
>probably be easily extended to other platforms, as well. Perhaps the
>Mac OS X port is one and the same as the OpenGL port?
>
>The Vision Egg confronts the same timing problems, although it is
>worse in Mac OS X than any other OS I have tried. In any case, I
>would be more than happy to collaborate on any methods used to "grab
>hold of the CPU and not let it go" on Mac OS X (or any OS!). At
>this point, I really don't have any suggestions. The last time I
>dug through Apple's header files (probably November/December), they
>did not seem to have the (I think POSIX standard) functions that I
>use in linux and SGI IRIX to boost a thread's scheduler information
>to maximum FIFO priority and to prevent memory paging (in sys/mman.h
>or sched.h). I believe they have updated their developer kit since
>then, but I haven't downloaded it yet and dug around to see if
>they've supported these calls.
>
>Also, I wanted also to highlight the possibility of controlling the
>Vision Egg from within Matlab. I don't know if this might be useful
>for you? There will be an .m file soon that demonstrates this, but
>the idea is that the Vision Egg can operate as a TCP server, and a
>remote program can control stimuli over the network. There's a 3rd
>party Matlab toolbox called tcp_ip which lets Matlab directly
>interface with this server. A demonstration of the server side is
>in the Vision Egg package as "demo/tcp/gratingTCP.py", and a Python
>version of what could be done in Matlab is gratingGUI. Obviously,
>precise timing can have issues when using the network, but with
>proper usage, all of the timing occurs on the Vision Egg computer.
>
>Thanks and best wishes,
>Andrew
>________________________________________________________
>Andrew Straw
>Ph.D. student -- Department of Physiology, University of Adelaide, Australia
>Developer -- The Vision Egg -- http://www.visionegg.org/
>andrew.straw@...
>________________________________________________________