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ERTS is a 16-bit DOS Application with highly accurate millisecond timing and precise stimulus presentation. Until today, a lot of research labs are purchasing and using ERTS because of its reliable performance and highly efficient scripting language that allows you to setup state-of-the-art experiments and collect accurate data without struggling with multi-tasking operating systems.
In order to take advantage of this software package your computer must meet certain legacy requirements:
| Operating System | ERTS must be installed and used under DOS, FreeDOS, or Win9x command line mode. Consequently, you need to configure your computer to boot from such legacy operating system either by setting up multiple partitions on your internal harddisk or by booting from external devices such as USB-stick or external harddisk. If you just want to develop and try out experiment scripts without data collection, you can use the ERTS evaluation versions also under any Windows DOS-Box |
| Graphics Cards | The standard ERTS grahics engine requires standard VGA. The 256-color version (ERTSVIPL) requires VESA-VBE compatible grahics cards which is the case for virtually all modern video cards as this is the standard for Windows boot up. For setting screen refresh rate higher than default, you need either a vendor specific utility, or for VESA-VBE 3.0 standard you can use VESA-VBE utilities |
| Sound Cards | The ERTS audio engine supports only legacy Soundblaster standard. This is a sever constraint on modern computers with PCI-based audio cards or motherboard audio chips. We currently recommend to use a PCI-sound card that support DOS-legacy drivers to emulate Soundblaster |
| Parallel Port | ERTS is using the parallal port as the external interface to optional response devices and EEG-synchronization. In order to use such advanced features, your computer must be equipped with a parallel port. Emulations via USB or serial port do not work. |
| Stimulus Format | ERTS provides very simple ways to define text and simple pixel material as part of the scripting language. for external files, supported graphics format is ICO, PCX, BMP, and RLE (max 8-bit, 256-colors). Supported video format is FLI, FLC (FLIC). Supported audio format is VOC and WAV (PCM). |
| Result Format | Results are stored as flat ASCII files with fixed-column width and an ERTS proprietary header. Using the included ERTSCODE utility you can convert result files into CSV files. ERTSCODE provides advanced options to generate CSV files that can be imported by statistical packages and biometric databases |