Remove mac display 'more space'

Coding
1

Hello,

A mac book allows the user to set the display settings on the monitor to: (1) larger text (2) default (3) more space.

The ‘more space’ version doesn’t display my stimuli properly. I would like to turn it off without relying on the user to do so themselves. Is there a way to do this?

Setting the monitor to None did not override it to the default settings.
win=psychoJS.window;
win.monitor=None;

thank you

2

PsychoPy can’t change the screen resolution: it just deals with whatever size is provided to it by the operating system. And online the situation is even more constrained, and for good reason: not many people would be happy if any given webpage could reach out and change operating system-level settings. So browsers don’t provide access to that sort of thing.

The solution here is to use units that are independent of the pixel resolution, such as height. That guarantees that the stimuli are the same physical size on a given monitor, regardless of the resolution setting.

https://www.psychopy.org/general/units.html

3

Hi Michael,

I need to operate by degree visual angle. I am running into problems with the newer macs running Big Sur. The stimuli are much smaller. On the older macs with High Sierra (old os), this does not seem to be a problem even when operating in retina pixels.
Do you know if there is a problem with psychopy being compatible with Big Sur or the newer macs?

thanks

4

I think you’ll need to do some detailed testing. e.g., at various resolution settings across the different OS versions, tabulate what you know the screen resolution to be vs the result of PsychoPy doing this:

print(win.size)

There can indeed be conflicts between the reported physical and “logical” pixel dimensions of a Mac window. That seemed to have been solved a while back for Mac retina displays but maybe things have broken again?

5

Hey! I moved this post from “online” to the “coding” category

6

Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the move. I think generally this works for most macs. But it is not working on the new macs with Big Sur. I will know once i have the machines in question.

7

Hi,

Is there a way to retrieve the display descriptions on the mac? For example, there is a display setting called Scaled → More space , which corresponds to a ‘look like’ resolution of 1680x1050. This particular setting is not working correctly on the newer macs running BigSur. I am not sure why. I would like to disallow this particular setting on experiment runs. I noticed that I have OS ‘MacIntel’ , but I don’t have a description for the resolution. I do have 1680, but I would like to also have the description in order to disallow. Is this possible?

thanks