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Available now for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

- Added support for gzips nested inside other archives.

- Added support for NSFE files.

- Rewrote the VGM engine to support the latest files, needed for Project 2612.

- Numerous fixes to the S98 engine; sound quality should be much better now.

- NSF and GBS files no longer allow you to go two tracks beyond the end of the file.

- The SNDH engine no longer stops playback at the three minute mark.

- Fixed previous/next song highlighting in KSS driver.

- Blargg sent in FME-07 support for the NSF engine (Gimmick!).

- R. Belmont added support for various PC AdLib formats (.ROL, .SCI, and .IMF).

- R. Belmont added support for .VTX files (Spectrum).

- R. Belmont added support for ID666 tags in SPC files, and converted the code to use the Game_Music_Emu engine.

http://www.bannister.org/software/ao.htm

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Outstanding release! Thanks!

Two quick questions:
-Is PC Engine support broken in this release? I played numerous .hes files (all of which can be found at zophar.net) and they just play silence for every track.
-Not to draw comparisons here, but in Game Music Box there are individual track names that show up in NSF Extended files. Are you planning on implementing that in the near future?

Otherwise, nearly perfect. I love finally having correct SNES sound, extended SNES tags, NSFEs, and Genesis VGMs. Thanks again!

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I just tried the .hes of Parodius Da!, it works ok for me on all of my builds. Might be a CodeWarrior thing.

ETA: Tried several more HES sets from Zophar, they all play fine on my PC and not at all on my G5. Richard? =)

I'll check out the NSFE per-track name too.

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CodeWarrior's optimizer decided to do bad things to 2.0b7 of Audio Overload. I'm a little miffed that this didn't show up earlier, but I guess I've been playing with the debug compile so long that I just assumed things would work in release mode (yes, I know that's a bad plan, but I'm seriously lacking in sleep right now so forgive me on that one!).

I've just replaced the Mac build with the optimizer disabled in a few strategic places. Please download again and let me know if problems persist.

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I've sent Richard the revised code for per-track NSFE naming and revised PC binaries with it included (as well as a hotfix for the Windows version not recognizing NSFEs in archives). I think he's asleep now though, so that'll have to wait.

PS: Zophar's posted PSFs for Resident Evil 1 & 2. I had no idea those games were sequenced, but sure enough there's raw terror coming out of my speakers now :shiver:

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OK, hes files work again. Thanks for the quick fix!

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I'm playing some songs on the new AO. Sorry for asking this question if it's "noobish" or just plain common knowledge around here, but this is the first time I've tried this program.... What is it that causes the music to skip whenever I roll the mouse scroll wheel?

I had the same problem with the Meridian Advance Player.


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I think it gives up too much CPU, at least on Windows. Whenever I change windows and do something (like scrolling a document with the mouse wheel), the playback tends to skip. This goes away if you set the process' priority to High in Task Manager.

This isn't a new thing, I just haven't been on the ball in mentioning it.

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Yeah, I should probably boost the thread priority for the playback to High by default. Windows' scheduler gets faked out a bit if you're a GUI app but you do your main work in another thread.

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Does this new release improve the emulation of SPC or NSF?
How close to "perfect" is the emulation of those?

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SPC and NSF are both now using blargg's engines and in both cases they should be perfect, limited only by the current state of knowledge of those chips. I don't know of any defects in either emulation.

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I know of a few minor differences. For NSF, nonlinear sound mixing for isn't implemented in the public release, since it's almost unnoticeable (I can send support if this is really desired). I also don't know the exact mix levels of the external sound chips (VRC6, Namco 106, FME-7), so these might be slightly off. The other aspects of sound should be very nearly perfect, though I still haven't written a complete set of verification ROMs for the NES APU.

For SPC, I've addressed all issues I've encountered so far. I know of a few differences in the DSP core that I haven't bothered to add (clamp before fourth Gaussian lookup, for example), since I haven't set up a good test framework. It shouldn't be hard to compare my DSP core to the latest docs to work out these, if anyone wants to. If they have an effect on sound, I haven't noticed it. I've done comparisons with sound track recordings from my SNES and found no audible difference.

I'm still actively working on my Game_Music_Emu sound engine (which AO uses) and welcome reports of possible inaccuracies. First check my list of buggy game music for things I've already verified to sound "wrong" on the actual system.

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BTW, check out the new rip of Genesis OutRunners on PJ2612 - it's hilariously bad compared to the arcade original (as heard in M1) smile

(No, I'm not saying the rip itself is bad, the game is).

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Quote
Originally posted by R. Belmont:
BTW, check out the new rip of Genesis OutRunners on PJ2612 - it's hilariously bad compared to the arcade original (as heard in M1) smile

(No, I'm not saying the rip itself is bad, the game is).
The statement below is true.
The above statement is false. :p

Your post probably would've sounded better like: "Check out the new rip of Genesis OutRunners on PJ2612. BTW, The gameplay is hilariously bad compared to the arcade original." :annoyed: Dang. That's my favorite one.


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Wow, nice release. Good work.

Is the .vtx support for Mac as well? When I try and play the files it causes AO to instantly quit.

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Sigh. It's possible that it is broken. Please point me to the files you're using?

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Tom: I'm not even judging the gameplay, just the music. I realize the YM2612 is a long way from a MultiPCM, but they weren't even trying :-)

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Richard, the files I am trying to use are located here .

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Could you say which file(s) from which archive(s) there are doing it? Every one I've tried from the "VTX, YM, etc" archive works fine, for instance (this is on Windows, but I need exact verification that it's Mac-only lest we waste Richard's time).

ETA: the "Mortal Kombat.vtx" from that archive is fantastic. *That's* how you make weak hardware go the distance :-)

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Ok, download the "ZX Spectrum Music v1.1" here should give you Nostalgic.RAR

nostalgic/bosconia/bosconia1.vtx

I get this message in the console:

Assertion (0) failed in "mac-file.c", function "file_check_queue", line 126

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The game itself and the MD conversion of the songs is pretty lousy... the readme I put in the archive wasn't the one I'd intended to, so I updated that real quick. ;p

As it now says...

I find the unrealism in this game hillariously bad. It's refreshingly ironic that you can run into Elephants that seem to litter the road - and are also seemingly placed to hit you if the curves in the road don't. Cable Cars are totally off their rails and there's 2, 3 of them at a time in San Francisco. I also like how you seem to be driving around the rim of Niagara Falls - and take it from someone who lives very close by and has been to Niagara Falls dozens of times in his life - the only road nearby is a pedestrian one and a footbridge. :p


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In fairness to any concept of realism, this *is* a game where the base premise is that you can *drive* from San Francisco to Hawaii to Australia.

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It looks like VTX is buggered on Mac OS X. This is what I get for not testing it; there are a few endian issues in the code. One of those is now fixed, so I'm getting something out of those files, but not recognisable music yet. I'll look into it again tomorrow.

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I like the faithful recreation of crowd cheering in Mega Driver as, err, white noise hiss. That song has to be the lowest of a fairly abysmal bunch. Actually I think Splash Wave isn't too bad (or maybe it's because I just like this tune so much that someone would have to do something really rotten to it for me to hate it ^^).

OMG I take the car ferry from San Francisco to Hawaii ALL the time!

You just don't see the boat in the game! Artistic License!!!

This is a perfect driving simulation. I recommend anyone about to take their driving test should study this game.

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Okay, I've fixed VTX on Mac for the next update. Any other problems?

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Woah, faster than the Ferrari of Outrun. Nice one Mr Bannister.

Yes, I have a heap of problems. Such as what to get my mother for christmas, how to pay off my credit card bill, etc, etc.

Oh wait, did you mean Audio Overload problems? drat.

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Well, the program still crashes if you try to play a non-recognizable sound file (NSFs with unsupported expansion sound chips work well for this purpose) and then play something else.

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Got a NSF with an unsupported expansion chip handy?

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2a03.org has NSFs with a listing of the sound chips they use. I found one that uses VRC-7 sound (unsupported) on the archive page : Curry Bread.nsf

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Okay, that one is fixed too. Anything else?

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Yu-No and Popful Mail are sounding great now. laugh Thank you very much! It's always great to have a new Audio Overload release.

In terms of more bugs, the S98 of Misty Blue seems to still have some hissing and buzzing. If you'd like, I can try to do a more thorough testing of the S98s on Rophon's site to see if there are any more problematic sets.

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BTW, I found a bug where playing some file types (.IMF/.SCI/.ROL) would cause .RAWs not to work afterwards. It'll be fixed in the next version (which should be soon). There's a new Valgrind out (it has PPC support, but only for Linux/PPC, sorry Richard) so I'll run another audit on the core as well :-)

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I just found a bug: For the SNES set "The Blues Brothers", bgmus1.spc, & bgmus4.spc, & gameover.spc cause Audio Overload to quit immediately.

You can find the set at zophar.net.

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Thanks, I found and fixed the problem in my SPC engine. I've forwarded the fix to the AO team for inclusion in the next update.

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I've just merged it. Anything else?

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The weird thing is, Blues Brothers played all the tracks fine in Game Music Box, despite that and AO using the same SPC engine now. Oh well, glad to see it's fixed.

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I release my programs with debugging checks turned off, since I add some checks in places where they slow things down significantly. AO builds on Mac are apparently shipped with these checks enabled (specifically, they don't #define NDEBUG). The bug was a very rare timing issue, that had unluckily stayed hidden for a while.

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My PC builds define NDEBUG.

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I'm a bit late, but thanks for this update. S98 is much better, non-PCM tracks like Sorcerian and YS sound perfect now. smile

Now, it just needs to display the Japanese track name correctly... wink

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Well, NES Turtles Tournament Fighters STILL doesn't work.

Are you EVER going to update the .GSF engine?

Why did you disable the .SPC channel selections?

Glad to see the end of that annoying .GBS bug, though.

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You're on the Mac (I can tell because you're barking about channel selectors, which I don't have in the PC versions), does Tournament Fighters work in Game Music Box?

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I'm not sure why I'm replying to this at all given the tone of your message. Remember that Audio Overload is a freeware project developed by R. Belmont and me in our spare time.

Think about how much money you've spent to use Audio Overload, and perhaps then consider if you would be better placed showing a little gratitude rather than the angry ranting tone visible in your post.

Quote
Originally posted by Murray:
Well, NES Turtles Tournament Fighters STILL doesn't work.
Look at the change history. Notice any update to the NSF engine? Funny, there's none. As such, there won't be any compatibility changes there. Besides, your problem was already answered in detail by the Game Music Box author . Did you read his comments?

Quote
Are you EVER going to update the .GSF engine?
As of this post, I will not be looking at GSF again until mid-2006 at the earliest. It is not a format I care about, and as the only thing it seems to generate is whinging (you're not the first) I've decided I simply don't need the hassle.

Quote
Why did you disable the .SPC channel selections?
The SPC channel selection support is a bug, which has already been fixed for the next release. If you had read the change log in the read me file, you could probably have worked this out yourself; note that the SPC engine was replaced altogether recently, and the person who did that forgot to reimplement channel muting.

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Boy this sounds like a certain Simpsons episode!

Murray: November 27th's Audio Overload was, without a doubt, the WORST RELEASE EVER! Rest assured, I was on the internet within days registering my complaint throught the world.

R. Bannister: I know it wasn't perfect but what right do you have to complain?

Murray: As a loyal user, I feel you owe me.

R. Bannister: What?! I've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free- I don't owe you anything. I mean if ANYTHING, you owe ME!

Murray: .............Worst release ever.

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Quote
Originally posted by Vlcice:
In terms of more bugs, the S98 of Misty Blue seems to still have some hissing and buzzing.
I had a look at this one.

R. Belmont -- you're better placed to trace this than me; it looks like the second AY8910 is responsible, but I have no clue how to fix. Any ideas?

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Boris: LOL!

Richard: I'll check it out.

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Quote
Originally posted by Speedy Boris:
Boy this sounds like a certain Simpsons episode!
Ah, good old episode 4F12

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F12.html

and a whole page dedicated to comic book guy for future parody posts.

http://www.snpp.com/guides/cbg.file.html

smf

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Misty Blue uses PCM. S98 PCM tracks (TheScheme, etc) don't sound right... maybe this is because the PCM samples aren't included in the archives...

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Depends - the YM2608 has built-in PCM drums that don't require an external ROM. If they're doing voices through some sort of AY trick that would certainly need samples though.

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I assume that the latest vg update (0.34) isn't compatible with AO 2.0b7? If it isn't, there's something else to merge for an upcoming release.

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What vg update? You mean VGM 1.5?

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The one on project2612's website.

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We already are updated for that. I think we should probably just go ahead and post what we've got since we're way behind the curve on that VGM update now :-) Sync me up, Richard wink

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Boris: AO2.0b7 should play everything on Project2612; if there's something that doesn't work do bring it to my attention.

Belmont: There's no change to VGM from 2.0b7 to the present, as far as I can remember anyway; I'm just about to go to bed but will create a code drop for you tomorrow.

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Right, VGM wasn't necessarily the interesting part, I just think we're out of bugs solvable in linear time (the S98s that have trouble are due to missing PCM, not any specific defect of our driver) so we may as well build the update.

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Ah okay. Give me a day or two to stress test the Mac code to make sure CodeWarrior hasn't done anything else dumb on me anyway.

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Quote
Originally posted by Speedy Boris:
I assume that the latest vg update (0.34) isn't compatible with AO 2.0b7? If it isn't, there's something else to merge for an upcoming release.
The only major differences were the implementation of Blargg's PCM Hipass code and a fix for no pause for non-looping tracks (Which, if you have it off, you might not even notice) and errors skipping short non-looping tracks. (which you might have.)

It'd be unlikely that the latter two bugs would manifest in Audio Overload, as RB and Richard check for that sort of stuff, I hope. :p

Therefore, you're not really missing too much, even if they don't update it immediately, but if they'd like to, by all means. wink

The sets themselves are unchanged and should play just fine in Audio Overload 2.0b7.


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Can I put in another request for a higher-FPS oscilloscope in the Windows version? It doesn't really match the music beat when it's only updating a handful of times per second.

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I've put an ungodly amount of effort into doing that and it hasn't really helped (the results are in fact in b7). I have a complete rewrite of the Windows frontend in plain Petzold going in an attempt to fix that, but it's far from usable yet.

Until then, if you have a Linux machine around the 'scope on it is 60 FPS no problem :-)

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OK, thanks for trying. I've been meaning to get some Lunix action going anyway. smile

Of course, wouldn't you know it but I tried a Slackware-based distro recently and the AO binary was incompatible, just like in that other thread here.

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Slack is a little *too* boringly stable to keep up with things like AO :-)

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The tunes from the Atari ST 20 year megademo has been released as SNDH but unfortunatly AO only playes a few of them like "hybrid.snd", "introv2.snd"... same problem with other SNDH players like Winjam.
click to download 20 year megademo SNDH files

works to listen to them in Steem, but i prefer to use a standalone musicplayer :-)

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This suggested bug fix probably isn't even worth mentioning, since the Project2612 vgms are quickly replacing the old gym format, but I might as well:

For certain gym sets, Audio Overload plays the songs incorrectly (i.e. notes slur together, wrong-sounding instruments, lots of dissonance), while Game Music Box plays them fine. Apparently the sets that are affected are ones that were ripped by Gens. Examples include (from zophar): Aero the Acrobat, Aladdin, Izzy's Quest For the Olympic Rings, Virtua Racing Deluxe.

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I have a sneaking suspicion that the culprit here might actually be Gens. Doesn't Game Music Box use a FM core based on that emulator?

Audio Overload uses the MAME FM core.

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Yeah. There are some claims that Gens is closer to the proper behavior of the Genesis, but given that Jarek's plugged the actual FM chips into an ISA card for detailed torture testing I find that unlikely. (Perhaps that's the difference between the 2612 and 3834 though - the former has some hardware bugs).

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Quote
Originally posted by R. Belmont:
Yeah. There are some claims that Gens is closer to the proper behavior of the Genesis, but given that Jarek's plugged the actual FM chips into an ISA card for detailed torture testing I find that unlikely. (Perhaps that's the difference between the 2612 and 3834 though - the former has some hardware bugs).
The Gens core is quite close, and is what the VGM Winamp Plugin uses, but Steve Snake's cores in Fusion kick the crap out of the Gens core.

Unfortunately, that code isn't open source, so we can't implement it unless Steve Snake releases it.

BTW; for those of you who follow Project2612, we've moved to a new server/host: Change your bookmarks to http://project2612.org . smile


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I've tried latest MAME FM core in my VGM sound engine and it plays things better, though it also has a few problems Gens doesn't have. The MAME FM maintainer is looking into some of the problems, so it should be the preferred core eventually. I'm not well-versed in FM chips so I can't do much but use whatever others have written.

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DP: thanks, I've updated my links.

blargg: Glad to hear Jarek's looking into the problems.

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Is there any possibility in the near future that the more accurate Megadrive/Genesis sound emulation will be implemented into the actual emulators like Genesis Plus and Generator?

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It's not quite as simple as that. Audio Overload is actually using the same FM chip emulation as Genesis Plus and Generator.

The VGM format (and GYM) are simply logs of the writes to this sound chip. When generated by Kega the data is far more precise than that coming from other emulators, and that is what produces the percieved improvement in sound quality.

Richard

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Ya know, the forum description's out of date. "10 different formats"? smile

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I've just updated it.

I really should get my act together and start working on it again. Just so busy frown

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AO now compiles in Xcode. Getting that to work was NOT fun; someone should explain to me at a later date how something that builds just fine in CodeWarrior can throw up more than four THOUSAND errors on moving to a different compiler - one which was actually in use already for building the Linux binary...

Anyway, anyone got an Intel mac handy? I've no idea if it works at all, though I have a universal binary now...

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Wacky. I compile it on GCC for all 3 of my builds, and most of my #if __GNUC__ stuff should've Just Worked. I assume you at least set LSB_FIRST properly for the Intel build?

ETA: ooh, yeah. GCC 4.x had some issues in some of the engines that I didn't feel like picking at. That's probably at least part of what you hit.

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I would imagine so. It turns out the Intel side didn't actually link (framework problem), but I'll solve that tonight.

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