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macOS setup notes

Issues

Psychtoolbox does not deal well with recent version of macOS, and especially running on the ARM chips. We don't actually want to run mission critical code on the 7T console from Psychtoolbox. mgl is a really good alternative, but would require a couple of fixes to integrate with VPixx, as button response and scanner trigger come through a different route (note HID / USB but the digital in ports from VPixx/ResponsePixx)... eiether way, for coding and testing, we want to be able to run things on Apple MacBooks with the new Apple Silicon, as many people, including students have those as their main work horse computers.

Things to do, to get things running.

  • Download recent version of Psychtoolbox (see github repo)
>> PsychtoolboxVersion
ans =
'3.0.19 - Flavor: Manual Install, 26-Feb-2024 17:27:13'
% and matlab itself

>> ver
----------------------------------
MATLAB Version: 9.10.0.1739362 (R2021a) Update 5
MATLAB License Number: 646274
Operating System: macOS  Version: 14.3.1 Build: 23D60

  • Important: ARM-architecture matlab / octave won't play nicely with Psychtoolbox. Make sure you run the (old-style) Intel versions via Rosetta (MK says on the website this make timing not usable for experiments, but for hacking up code remotely this is good.)

  • equivalent for octave

brew search octave

We actually need to do some backflips to get x84_64 binaries of octave through brew ( see this article ), so let's check if we can jsut download the binaries for octave another way 😬

  • nope... won't work, so back to the two homebrew versions
# .... 
octave 8.4.0_2 is already installed but outdated (so it will be upgraded).
Error: Cannot install under Rosetta 2 in ARM default prefix (/opt/homebrew)!
To rerun under ARM use:
  arch -arm64 brew install ...
To install under x86_64, install Homebrew into /usr/local.

get a Rosetta flavour shell

arch -x86_64 zsh
cd /usr/local && mkdir homebrew
curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew

You may have to sudo mkdir homebrew in that folder and chmod a+rw to get the curl command to run.

After that's successfully installed, we can now do the following (on my machine, recompiling gcc and octave took - literally - hours, so make some coffee ;)

# get the version control svn for rosetta first
arch -x86_64 /usr/local/homebrew/bin/brew install svn
# then octave install should work
arch -x86_64 /usr/local/homebrew/bin/brew install octave

and now we should be able to run octave in x86_64 (rosetta), which will then in turn make Psychtoolbox binaries work ok (we hope!!)

On my machine, there are then two octave installs. One for each architecture. To run the Psychtoolbox compatible one:

arch -x84_64 /usr/local/homebrew/bin/octave

For multimedia / video

Need to install version of GStreamer https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download//#macos. Apparently arch is ok to be x86_64? (will this play nicely with intel code running octave?)

Notes / video log

Basic install

{% include youtube.html id="4B3s1_dK_DA" %}