Neuroscan/E-Prime Buffer

[Jessica Miller]

Thank you for the input, everyone!! This is all good food-for-thought,
as I've only been working with E-Prime and Neuroscan less than two
years. I'm sorry for not being more clear in my original post.

Providing a script in this post would not be of much help because I
get "Error: Buffer Overflow" in Neuroscan 4.5 with numerous E-Prime 2
experiments. The E-Prime computer is connected via parallel ports, and
the hookup with Neuroscan equipment and Neuroscan computer is a mix of
serial and usb ports. I realize that the problem is most likely
Neuroscan, but I have been in constant contact with our technician who
tells me there is little he can do after upgrading the computers.
Thus, I thought perhaps it is a common problem with E-Prime (not
specific to any particular experiment, but the software in general).
When Neurscan crashes E-Prime continues on, thus causing us to lose
precious data.

Again, I posted on here hoping someone had a similar problem and could
tell me if they had a problem with the E-Prime software, the ports on
either computer, a cable connection, or the Neuroscan software. I
apologize if it isn't the most appropriate place to post this
question.

Thanks for any help!

On Dec 1, 4:34 am, Michiel Spape <Michiel.Sp... at nottingham.ac.uk>
wrote:
> Hi,
> One thing to add to what has already been said: are we talking about error: overflow, or error: buffer overflow?
> The former is generally really simply helped, it tends to be caused by a variable defined as integer but then getting a long number assigned to it, for instance:
> Dim a As Variant
> Dim i As Integer
> i = -32768
> a = Abs(i)                                                       'Result is a Long.
> i = Abs(i)                                                        'Overflow!
> (from ebasic help)
> That is, an integer can only have values assigned to it between -32768 and (+)32767, thus assigning Abs(-32768) [results in +32768) causes an overflow. This would explain your scenario as follows: you have, for instance, a cumulative reaction time (or the sum of RTs), which sooner (if participants are really slow) or later (if they aren't) causes the overflow by reaching higher than 32767. Personally, I often get this because I define a variable as integer and do constant clock.read (which gets the time in ms from the onset of the experiment). This causes an overflow after less than a minute.  Anyway, the error can usually be solved by defining the variable as long (or variant, but a curse rests on such ill-defined types) instead of integer.
>
> The latter (buffer overflow) is presumably associated with your neuroscan setup, which, I would expect, uses serial port communication. I would have predicted that something like 'flushoutputbuffer' might have helped you, but, according to the help file:
> "This function is reserved for future use.  Serial output communications are synchronous.  Data is always flushed from the output buffer after write operations are called."
> Did the future come with E-Prime 2? Are you using E-Prime 2?
>
> Best,
> Mich
>
> Michiel Spapé
> Research Fellow
> Perception & Action group
> University of Nottingham
> School of Psychologywww.cognitology.eu
>
> From: e-prime at googlegroups.com [mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of ben robinson
> Sent: 30 November 2010 20:20
> To: e-prime at googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Neuroscan/E-Prime Buffer
>
> which program is giving you the "Buffer Overflow" error, eprime or neuroscan?  if eprime, does eprime crash when the error occurs?  can you see where you were in the script when i crashes, and does it always crash at the same place in the script?
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Jessica Miller <jess.cogne... at gmail.com<mailto:jess.cogne... at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> We have Neuroscan 4.5 collecting ERP data while E-Prime presents the
> experiment to participants. Recently we have been getting a "Buffer
> Overflow" error message as soon as 15 minutes into an experiment and
> as late as 1 hour 20 minutes. I am wondering if anyone else has had
> this problem and if it is a problem with the data being sent from E-
> Prime to Neuroscan, or if it is another problem. Both computers that
> we use meet all requirements for both software packages, and were
> fully upgraded (RAM, video memory, etc) in the last month.
>
> Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
>
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