Launching MediaLab and DirectRT from a single computer

[Cirano]

Hi Jarvis,

I would like to know if it is possible to launch multiple simultaneous sessions from a single computer to others (all the computers would have the software installed and the experiment files saved locally or on a shared network drive) in the same network.


Thanks in advance for your help.

[jarvis24]

Interesting question. You can launch ML from a batch file (see http://support.empirisoft.com/showthread.php?t=170) and you can do this in combination with an autostart file to automate the input of subject IDs and Condition IDs. You can do a similar thing wih DirectRT or just have ML launch the DRT sessions after it starts. The challenge would be to execute those batch files on all machines at the same time. I'm guessing there is probably a freeware or shareware utility out there that can run an exe or batch file on multiple machines on a network simultaneously. I would start with Google or download.com for that. You could also get fancy and have all your machines waiting for a TTL signal via MediaLab or DirectRT. Have one external device send this signal to all the machines via their parallel ports and they would all proceed in perfect synch. Depends on how comfortable you are with a hardware setup like that.