PTF 0.1

PTF (Psychological Test Framework) is is a software development kit for making psychological test and experiments on every day hardware.

The Psychological Test Framework (PTF) is a software development kit for making psychological test and experiments on every day hardware. This includes experiments concerning perception and reaction times used in the research of human cognition.

In the past special hardware exspecially extremely expensive graphic cards were used to gurantee low response and execution times. The situation has changed since fast hardware accelerators became popular and widely used. We hope this framework will become a good replacement.

The core is a shared library for Linux and MacOS X which offers all needed services to make writing this kind of programs fairly easy (take a look at the feature list).

The system is developed for the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences located in Munich, Germany.

Installing the binaries on Linux

After the compilation of the source code do a make install to install ptf. If you downloaded the binary distribution for Unix, type:

 make install

Binaries are installed into the directory 'prefix'/bin. Use make install_docs to install the documentation and examples into 'docdir'/doxygen.

'prefix' defaults to /usr but can be changed with the --prefix option of the configure script. The default 'docdir' directory is 'prefix'/share/doc/packages and can be changed with the --docdir option of the configure script.

Alternatively, you can also copy the library from the lib directory manually to some lib directory in your search path. This is sufficient to use ptf.

If you have a RPM or DEP package, then please follow the standard installation procedure that is required for these packages.


Product's homepage

Here are some key features of "PTF":

· hardware accelerated graphics using opengl
· sound support for wav files
· support for displaying pictures (serveral formats are supported, e.g. png, jpg, tiff)
· high resolution timers
· support for joysticks as input devices
· support for mice as input devices
· support for keyboard as input device
· completely modular design
· support for external generated sequence files
· support for several displays (e.g. for using the notebooks external VGA for the test and the LCD for monitoring)