Fullscreen Pygame issue on Windows
Problem Statement
I am encountering a frustrating issue on some of our Windows 7 machines. For some machines, the experiment I have created runs normally.
On others, however, the fullscreen display is never shown, instead, the pygame logo is displayed in the taskbar. If you click on the pygame logo, the screen flashes black and then you are returned to the Windows desktop. No errors are shown and the program appears to be running in the background. If I turn on windowed mode (or set develop_mode) then the experiment runs as expected. I would rather not do this though.
Request
Is there any information that I have missed that could solve this problem, or help me to further diagnose it?
Example Code (That displays problem behaviour)
import expyriment as xpy
xpy.control.initialize()
xpy.control.start()
xpy.control.end()
Output from get_system_info
pygame 1.9.4
Hello from the pygame community. https://www.pygame.org/contribute.html
Expyriment 0.9.0 (Python 3.6.5)
-m
System Info
hardware_audio_card:
hardware_cpu_architecture: AMD64
hardware_cpu_details: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz
hardware_cpu_type: Intel64 Family 6 Model 60 Stepping 3, GenuineInt
el
hardware_disk_space_free: 233927 MB
hardware_disk_space_total: 476438 MB
hardware_internet_connection: Yes
hardware_memory_free: 3273 MB
hardware_memory_total: 8100 MB
hardware_ports_parallel: []
hardware_ports_parallel_driver: None
hardware_ports_serial: [<serial.tools.list_ports_common.ListPortInfo ob
ject at 0x08559C70>, <serial.tools.list_ports_common.ListPortInfo object at 0x08
559BF0>]
hardware_video_card: RDPDD Chained DD
os_architecture: 32bit
os_details: SP1
os_name: Windows
os_platform: Windows
os_release: 7
os_version: 6.1.7601
python_expyriment_build_date: Thu Mar 9 13:48:59 2017 +0100
python_expyriment_revision: c4963ac
python_expyriment_version: 0.9.0
python_mediadecoder_version: 0.1.5
python_numpy_version: 1.15.1
python_pil_version: 1.1.7
python_pygame_version: 1.9.4
python_pyopengl_version: 3.1.0
python_pyparallel_version:
python_pyserial_version: 3.4
python_sounddevice_version: 0.3.12
python_version: 3.6.5
settings_folder: None
Comments
Hi there,
that is strange. One thing I noticed in your system info is that your video card is noted as "RDPDD Chained DD". I think RDPDD is usually reported when using remote desktop. Are you using remote desktop on those machines? Using remote desktop on Windows in combination with Expyriment will as far as I know not work correctly.
Hmm, hadn't noticed that.
There are no current remote desktop connections to one system I just tested that is failing to display fullscreen, but TeamViewer was waiting for connections (but no active connections).
On the two machines that I can reliably get to work the same video card is reported - so it is possibly not that alone, running a system info-dump through a diff utility only shows disk space and memory free differences, and none of those numbers is significantly low.
Unfortunately, this Uni's locked down systems policy prevents me from digging too far into the sysadmin side of things, but I'll see if this thread of inquiry gets me anywhere today.
Well, if you are not using the machine via remote desktop, then the problem probably is elsewhere.
Maybe you can talk to the technicians at your university about this. It seems to be a machine specific issue (e.g. Windows settings, different drivers, etc.) that is unrelated to Expyriment (or at least out of our control).