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gtoal

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Posts posted by gtoal

  1. Are you planning to sell made-up boards (and the programming adaptor) or is this the sort of project where you release the Gerbers and people get them made and assembled by services like JLPCB etc? (and people build their own adaptors)  I ask because I'm pretty sure I'm not up to assembling surface mount components.  I think I maxed out at soldering 0.1in DIL packages. But if you're planning to sell completed boards I'm potentially interested.  Do you know yet how much you'll be able to sell them for?

     

  2. On 11/12/2023 at 5:35 PM, Blazing Lazers said:

    I have an almost complete Vectrex set, minus the homebrews. All I need are a Minestorm II cart, a boxed 3D Imager, and a complete Mr. Boston. I could swing the Imager, but not a Minestorm II cart at $4,000 like a recently ended listing apparently sold. I might settle for identical repros. Looking around online, I don't see any being offered, even though boxes for common games and even system boxes are available. If nobody is offering such, surely it couldn't be too difficult to make them. If anyone knows of a person selling the above, or can easily make one on commission, please let me know. 

     

    I made a couple of Mr Boston repros last year as fun items for the Vectrex Fans Unite! Secret Santa present swap.  They look good under glass but wouldn't stand up to close hands-on inspection (they contain an obviously modern PCB for example, and the edge connector is visibly different even from from the outside) but if you just want something cool to put on your shelf, they're not too hard to make and look good.  I posted all the artwork on the VFU group (links below).  I'm not offering to make one though, you'll need to expend some effort yourself.  Given the strong feelings in this community about reproductions you might want to write REPRO in large friendly and indelible letters on the inside of the cart, if not also the outside, should you build one yourself.

     

    https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=6084626221601414&set=p.6084626221601414&type=3

     

    All the real carts have pretty shitty looking labels so I used the well-known old antique faker's trick of tea or coffee staining the paper parts. (You have to love those Lovejoy novels!) Carrying the labels around in your pocket for a week helps too 🙂  (Just be aware that raster-printed labels are clearly recognisable under a magnifying glass, and there are other ways to easily distinguish real Mr Boston carts by anyone who knows the key telltale.)

     

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex/posts/2004289553114745/
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex/posts/2004290273114673/
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex/posts/2004292616447772/
    https://gtoal.com/vectrex/MR-BOSTON-NOTES.txt

    https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/rebuilt-print-Clean-Sweep-two-up.pdf

     

    The box is just a standard Clean Sweep box with an added label (above) and I suspect a Clean Sweep overlay could probably be modified with white Letraset but I didn't go that far myself since my effort was just for fun and not an attempt to create a passable fake.  Sean Kelly sells a very nice repro overlay that is clearly marked as such - that would be your easiest option.  Add a bottle of hooch and a Mr Boston bartenders' guide and you'll have quite a nice display in your game room.

     

    G

     

    • Like 1
  3. 24 minutes ago, RockLobster said:

    One thing I'm shamefully disappointed in were how many arcade games on the PiTrex are still without sound.  

    This would be better in a separate Pitrex thread, but since you're new here I'll answer here this time, but please don't flood the Vecfever thread with a lot of followups.  The info below is mostly known to the members of our Facebook group, Vectrex Fans Unite!, where we hang out more often than here or proboards.

    The Vectrex hardware doesn't really support sampled sound (except in a couple of very limited ways where the sound is carefully interleaved with the graphics, as in the Bad Apple demo etc) so *all* arcade games that have sound need to have *all* the sound completely recoded from scratch to use the tone generator on the Vectrex to produce effects that sound a bit like the originals. [*] Malban from the PiTrex team did a few by hand (the most popular games, such as Asteroids and Battlezone) and asked for programmers in the community to help out with adding sound for more games, but no-one volunteered.  All our code is on github and anyone who wants to improve the games is welcome to modify it.  The VF is considerably more developed because Thomas, the developer, has the resources to work on that project extensively - the three of us who put together the Pitrex do not.  We got it to a stage where it's acceptably playable but none of us are currently putting dedicated hours into converting more games - we all have our own interests and although sometimes what we're working on overlaps with game emulation, at other times it doesn't - for example my most recent Pitrex work has been R&D in the graphics area under Linux, for supporting the use of the Pitrex as a general purpose vector display for programmers such as in CAD applications.  Remember, Pitrex is a community project, not a commercial product. We open sourced the hardware design (by Kevin) and agreed to Kevin selling the boards commercially to ensure that there would always be a good supply of them, but the other team members don't make a penny from board sales or anything else, so although we do consider the project to be ongoing, you should expect further development to be intermittent, with 2023 having been a rather lean year.

    One last thing; the Pitrex wasn't designed initially as a general arcade emulation machine - it was an offshoot of my wanting a mechanism to run the arcade version of Tailgunner on the Vectrex.  That project actually was what spurred Thomas into adding arcade emulation to the VF and by the time we started to get the Pitrex hardware working, Thomas was well ahead of the game in emulating vector arcade games, and the Pitrex became seen as a cheap (but admittedly inferior) substitute for the VF which was in short supply.  But the fact that it is actually usable as a general purpose emulator should be seen as a bonus, at its heart it's still a Tailgunner platform!

     

    Graham

     

    [footnote *: unless you use the linux sound hardware on the Pi Zero, but that requires hardware which not all Pitrex users will have.  Also  most of the O/S support for sound is only available on the Linux Pitrex implementation, but the most R&D and the primary release for gaming has been done on Raspberry Pi bare metal, so things like using Bluetooth for sound are not currently practical.  Getting emulators like AAE to run smoothly under linux so such things are possible is the sort of R&D that we *are* currently working on, at the expense of modifying individual games to add approximate sound-alikes, but that sort of R&D is more long term and we can make no promises for when/if something usable will come out of it. ]

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  4. 1 hour ago, mikesk8 said:

    Cool! Where do you sell them? I would be potentially interested ;-) Thanks!

    Just to note, he said 'cost' not 'price' 🙂  I think he's saying he makes them for himself and that's how much it costs him.  I don't think he's selling them at a Euro each.   btw I think he's in Spain - I remember reading his posts on a Spanish board last year ... yes, found it: https://www.va-de-retro.com/foros/viewtopic.php?p=183951 so postage to the US for a cheap home-made overlay would be excessive.

  5. All our regular members know this of course, but for the benefit of the lucky few who've recently acquired a Vectrex, just a quick hello to say that it's a good idea to get a loadable cartridge if you can find one as you can load roms like the test rom on to it and not have to buy a dedicated cartridge.  Also you can get bare vectrex cartridge PCBs from various folks and Sean Kelly sells perfect injection-moulded clones of the plastic part of the cartridge to make it look nice (or you can 3D print your own).  A neat trick sometimes done is to embed a small LED voltmeter in the cartridge when making a test cart as discussed above ( testcart.png ).  Also if you want to modify the test software to add your own tests, I have a WIP disassembly of it at https://gtoal.com/vectrex/disassemblies/TestRev4.asm

    • Like 2
  6. 1 hour ago, mikesk8 said:

    Hi All, I have just got my PiTrex and Pi :) It is an amazing solution I need to say with a lot of possibilities. I have few questions already and wanted to ask you what is the best place to ask them? ;)

    You should have received a sheet with the PiTrex that has the address of our chat group. You could ask here and I'll be happy to answer but asking on our group is more likely to be answered quickly and more definitively! Here's where to go to join: https://groups.io/g/pitrex-dev There may be a slight delay on your first post as there are anti-spam measures in place but they'll be removed as soon as you've posted. 

  7. 5 hours ago, hcmffm said:

    If wanted, I could provide printable PDFs of all the Vectrex Manuals² that I've created so far.

    That would be great, thanks! It's unfortunate that booklet printing is no longer a feature of Windows printer drivers - it used to be many years ago! I'll take my temporary versions down when you add that option.

     

    You'll notice when you create them that the front and back checker patterns on some of the manual covers won't align - for Clean Sweep I had to create those as a two-page spread which I then split so that they joined up again when printed as a booklet.

     

    Having done a crude version of just 2 manuals recently, I appreciate more than ever how much effort you put into recreating the entire suite of manuals!  It's much appreciated.

     

    Does Corel Draw offer the option of creating a print version on a printer that does double-sided printing automatically?  It's quite awkward to have to do two runs of the same file, selecting half the pages on one run and the other half on the next run, while ensuring that you put the output of the first run back in the printer tray in the proper orientation.  I remember how we had to do that years ago before the printers handled the flipping for you and it would inevitably lead to at least one wasted run when I put the papers back in the wrong way round or the wrong way up!

     

    Graham

  8. Here's another 2-up manual for printing and center-stapling.  This one has a couple of extra pages for a gatefold pull-out.  Identify the place in the manual where they would go, cut off the single page that is to be replaced by the fold-out, and attach with 'invisible tape' on one side.  Obviously do all this before stapling.  There are two pages (30 and 31) where the fold-out is a 2-page sheet; but page 32 folds out a 4-page sheet (which you can trim down to about 3.5 pages).  You want the folded pages to fold down to a little narrower than the regular pages so that when you trim the stapled booklet you don't accidentally cut off any of the fold edges and lose most of the fold-out!

     

                           https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/vectrex-service-manual-print.pdf

     

    The first page should be on better quality paper and in colour, for the cover. The rest can be in black and white.

     

    Print centered with 'fit-to-printable-area' and double-sided, with the flip on the short edge.  I've oriented the images for portrait mode so don't worry about selecting landscape. All the pages print as double-sided, even the ones that just have printing on one side - it should make it easier for you to print without messing about with multiple files or printing subranges with different options.

     

    I've straightened as much as I can but have not photoshopped the images at all and it is all bitmap from a scan, there's no re-typed text so it's not up to Helmut standard.

     

    I've tested it as a 'mini-manual' on US letter using the printer driver's down-scaling.  But it should work at the original size on A3/11x17 too, though I haven't tested it yet.

    Unlike the previous post of a Clean Sweep manual, I've finally worked out how to set the absolute size in a pdf file 🙂

     

    Graham

     

    • Like 1
  9. Since I needed a clean copy of the Clean Sweep manual to print, I tidied up the above scans in Photoshop and recreated some of the text similar to the way Helmut does - this should tide anyone over until Helmut adds Clean Sweep to his collection. I did use one of Helmut's graphics (of the computer) which was cleaner than my scan.  (Sorry it was created in Photoshop, Helmut, I don't have and wouldn't know how to use Corel Draw.  Nevertheless if you want the PSD files for each page let me know and I can upload them for you.)

     

    I redid the cover so that when printed two-up, the two cover sheets join up seamlessly - and rather cheekily I tweaked the page colour a tiny bit to yellow the paper and make it look more like my own original.  I've been using this paper to print on and it's pretty close to the real thing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JZ7Q6CD

    (when you guillotine the booklet to size, the edges of the paper will look bright white compared to an original old copy - one way to disguise that is to dip your finger in tea or coffee (no milk!) and run it along the edge to stain it darker!)

     

    The manual prints to almost the exact right size on US letter paper if 'fit to printable area' is selected.  You need to print double-sided and centered, with 'flip on short edge' selected.  I don't know if it will print the same size on A4.  (I'm still learning how to put together pdf files but haven't yet mastered setting absolute size/resolution yet.)

     

    The file https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/rebuilt-print-Clean-Sweep-two-up.pdf is pre-built for booklet printing so you can fold the double page in the middle and staple and trim it.  A regular copy for viewing on-screen or assembling into a booklet some other way is at https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/rebuilt-Clean-Sweep.pdf .  It ends up very hard to distinguish from an original!

     

    The 'old paper' tint was done by trial and error on my laser printer.  It's quite possible that an inkjet or some other laser might render it differently! If the colours come out weird then just print in black and white mode.

    • Like 2
  10. On 11/22/2018 at 11:20 AM, hcmffm said:

    Fonts used in the Vectrex manual²s are Helvetica, Avalon, Golden Old Style, and Gill Sans in various weights.

    "Golden Old Style" is a modern clone of Goudy Old Style which is what the original would almost certainly have been.  I'd have to see the original to know which foundry's version was used - there are often very small differences in one or two glyphs that distinguish them.  Occasionally the only detectable differences are in the kerning. Similarly, Avalon is likely to be a clone of ITC Avant Garde. (The Q is very distinctive.) Given the use of Gill Sans I suspect they're all Monotype fonts, though it could actually be Humanist which is Bitstream's clone version. Most foundries would have reasonable clones of Helvetica, Avant Garde, Goudy Old Style and Gill Sans, but seeing them all together strongly hints of Monotype fonts.

    • Like 2
  11. I needed to print a Clean Sweep manual today, and since that is the single one that Helmut hasn't finished yet, I had to hack out a quick scanned version of it myself.

     

    If they're of use to anyone, the files are in

     

    Full scan, regular format:

      https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/Clean_Sweep_Manual_Scan.pdf

     

    As above but optimised a little for screen viewing:

      https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/Clean_Sweep_ScreenRes_Manual_Scan.pdf

     

    And the one I actually needed, for printing 2-up double-sided (landscape, flip on short edge) to create a booklet: 

      https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/print-Clean_Sweep_Manual_Scan.pdf

     

    If the scans are helpful to you Helmut, you're welcome to them.  Copies of your own manuals are temporarily in the parent directory https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/ where I've been experimenting with writing a program to re-page the pdf files so that they can be printed as proper booklets (2-up, portrait, flip on short edge).

    The software is not quite perfected yet but when it is I'll send you the sources if you want them.

     

    (I haven't actually printed the 2-up version yet as I just finished this around 5am and need to head for bed now, but they look OK to the Mark-1 eyeball...)

     

    Graham

     

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  12. At the moment, complementary.  The Vextreme hardware is almost identical to the Vecfever hardware but apart from one test by Malban, doesn't have any of the native arm execution that makes the Vecfever excellent, so it functions primarily as a multicart.  Whereas the Pitrex is primarily an emulation engine and comes closer to the VF's emulation, but it isn't really a multicart, although it sort of gets the same effect, by emulating the Vectrex.  It's all about the software.  Both units have hardware that can do all the VF can do, but it would take a lot more software effort for either one to be equal to it.  Both are hobby projects and neither has the manpower to dedicate to software improvements - expect them to come along over time as people work on them as and when.

     

  13. 10 hours ago, mikesk8 said:

    I did opposite:) bought recently VecMulti and waiting now for PiTrex :) I hope it will be available soon and then will manage to get Pi for some reasonable price. I am curious if potential of multicore Pi Zero 2 processing will be ever used in PiTrex.

    Quite unlikely in bare-metal, as the code would also have to implement multitasking as well, but it could plausibly be used in the Linux distro.  I think Kevin's code improvements in the area of avoiding glitches caused by processor/memory contention have a chance of allowing the multicore processor to draw vectors without random glitches.  I haven't tried working under linux with a Zero 2 yet but will at some point. We need to backport Malban's Zero2 mods to Linux first.

  14. On 9/28/2022 at 4:16 AM, D-Type said:

    I asked this question on the PiTrex forum some time back, after some investigation I did regarding the various Pi versions out there. The PiZero is based on the same CPU as the original Pi, so there's a good chance that could be made to work, but you might still have to know what you're doing, software-wise, as well as having to sort out the physical differences. 

    One of the early pies (I think a model A?) was the same exact processor but at a lower clock speed.  I did get another Pi B to work, mainly by changing the peripheral base address and recompiling:

    #ifdef RPI2
        #define PERIPHERAL_BASE     0x3F000000UL
    #else
        #define PERIPHERAL_BASE     0x20000000UL
    #endif

    - and now that Malban has shown the Pi Zero 2 can work I expect the same changes he made can be backported to the Linux distro (in fact some of the changes appear to have been made already) and probably that opens up a few more boards too.  There's never been an intrinsic reason not to support full sized boards, it's just that we never did so as there was no real need to at the time and we made a decision early on to only support the Pi Zero in order to simplify development and maintenance.  Now if Pi Zeroes had dried up but not the larger Pies, then I could see a reason to add them now, but the larger boards are just as hard to find as the zeroes so you might as well hold out for a zero. Connecting up mechanically isn't that hard, it's just a ribbon cable - I think this would work: https://www.amazon.com/erounder-Raspberry-Female-Computer-Accessories/dp/B08H26LY71/ - so if you're up for getting your hands dirty and messing around with the source code, you might be able to put something together that works.

     

    Graham

    PS This Unix command: fgrep def `find pitrex piTrexBoot -name '*.[hc]'`|grep PI[0-4]|grep -v SPI

    can be quite helpful when looking for files that may need tweaking.

  15. 54 minutes ago, Vectrexer said:

    A copy for a call for a Secret Santa 2022 coordinator posted in the "Vectrex Fans Unite!" group on Facebook.  I think the hope is to expand and include members on Vector Forums (https://vectorgaming.proboards.com/board/20/vectrex) and AtariAge (https://forums.atariage.com/forum/182-vectrex/) into Secret Santa this year. So if anyone is up for the joy and on all three platforms please jump in. 

    If we do expand the community, the coordinator will have to be someone in all 3 groups. It won't work if the person wrangling everyone is one of the folks who won't use facebook under any circumstances!

    For those of us here who are not also FB users, what we did over the last couple of years was this: everyone declares how many presents they'd like to contribute (within a small upper limit) and we arrange that everyone receives as many as they contribute, but if possible from someone else rather than a straight swap. We suggested a notional $5 - $10 value on gifts but several of the contributions last year turned out to be much nicer than expected!  Everything should be Vectrex-related in some way, but the range was quite wide from stickers and cartridge labels through home-made overlays and presentation boxes to actual cartridges of home-brew games. I think I also saw some laser-cut Christmas-tree ornaments. Just to give you some ideas. We try to optimise shipping costs by clustering European users separately from USA users, but you can say if you're up for paying transatlantic postage rates and a few people may be paired with someone from another continent if we can't find enough matches locally which tended to happen with last-minute additions. (We have a rather hacky program that helps match people up.) The earlier we can firm up the numbers the easier it is to make the allocations.  To avoid any one person having to collect everyone's addresses, that part is distributed and we just ask each recipient to send their address to their Santa. So it's not entirely secret but doing it that way avoids a GDPR nightmare.

    • Like 1
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  16. 2 hours ago, fdr4prez said:

    If he isn't open to making it open source, then maybe someone can purchase it outright and pay him a royalty for each unit sold

     None of that is ever going to happen, which is why we came up with the PiTrex.  OK, the few of us who created the PiTrex software haven't worked on it full time for years like Thomas has, but we did at least ensure a plentiful supply of boards at a fair price. All the software we're created is open source, so eventually - especially if more programmers get involved - it should catch up with the work Thomas has done. A lot of people find it quite playable already. The only down sides are 1) less developed software, as mentioned; and 2) the cost of Pi Zeroes has gone  through the roof compared to when we created the project. And maybe 3), the Pi Zero may be end-of-life before the PiTrex is 😞

    Here are our project's primary URLs:

    http://www.ombertech.com/cnk/pitrex/wiki/index.php?wiki=Software_Ports&PHPSESSID=a1mnbcaghfdkqi2b95todlgk81

    https://github.com/malbanGit/pitrex-baremetal/ http://vide.malban.de/pitrex/pitrex-baremetal-download http://vide.malban.de/pitrex

    https://github.com/gtoal/pitrex/

    http://www.ombertech.com/pitrex.php https://www.tindie.com/products/ombertech/pitrex-vectrex-to-raspberry-pi-interface/

     

    It would be (relatively) easy to design new cards that avoided the need for a Pi; they would be more expensive but within reason (and the Vextreme for example is pretty similar to the Vecfever hardware already and could be used for a Vecfever-like system right now if anyone were to write the code for it) but the problem affecting all these projects is manpower - to make something acceptably cheap, it pretty much has to be done as an unpaid hobby, but the amount of work needed is equivalent to at least a year of full-time employment, which none of us have the time for. So we do as much as we can when we can, but have other things to do as well and will never be in a position to dedicate serious months of full-time work to this the way Thomas did.  So if you want emulation of *all* the CPUs and you want full sound with every game, it's Thomas' way or add it to PiTrex yourself.

     

    Graham

    • Like 3
  17. how fuzzy is the view through the main transparent part?  Most home printers and standard inks tend to be somewhat fuzzy compared to semi-transparent materials such as stage light filters. And what may look like strong colour when laid flat on white paper often appears washed-out when lit from behind by bright vectors on the Vectrex...

    fuzzy.jpg

  18. 3 hours ago, bah said:

     I have a pi zero 1.3 without wifi and it works fine except I can't download stuff by wifi.  I did have to solder on header pins. If you have any  pi zero, try it.

    Our suggestion of using Pi Zero W (apart from the 'with header' option only being available on the 'W') was because when we first started distributing boards, we expected people would be developing on them and using the Pi version of linux.  If you get one just for play and are using Malban's distro, then there's no advantage or requirement to use the 'W' version (though you do still need the header).

     

    Adafruit and PiMoroni do 'hammer headers' if you don't want to solder them on.  Avoid that kind of header from eBay as chances are extremely high that the ones you'll get are too tight to attach by hand.  Some major electronics vendors do supply good ones directly but I can't remember which vendors and anyway they wouldn't be significantly cheaper (after shipping charges, because big electronics vendors tend not to offer a cheap shipping option and send everything by courier) than those two retail sites above.

     

    I don't think the shortage is 'supply chain issues'.  My guess is that the Pi Corp is allowing the older models to sell out before releasing large numbers of the new Pi Zero 2 so that their resellers are not left with unsellable stocks of the older model.  It's been their playbook in the past.  Usually the new version then drops in price but I suspect that won't happen in the case of the Pi Zeroes as its clear they've regretted the too-low initial price from the start.

     

    btw we don't yet have support for the Zero 2 *under linux* but it may come.  Malban supports it already in single-core mode with the bare metal distro.

     

    G

     

  19. 18 minutes ago, uczmeg said:

    Star Wars for me is also the holy grail.

     

    From the videos I've seen so far you are going to be disappointed right now if that is your main goal as it's not ready. I imagine it is the most complicated to get running well.

     

    It's exciting we have projects like that coming.

     

    On that subject... we're working on a static binary translator for 6809 code, which is progressing quite well: http://gtoal.com/SBTPROJECT/6809sbt/

     

    If there's anyone here who is interested in compiler techniques, a little experiment I'm playing with at the moment is a source-to-source optimiser for the subset of C that is output by the SBT, which would eventually let us improve the generated program more than is currently being done: http://gtoal.com/SBTPROJECT/6809sbt/experimental/precedence-parser/parser.c.html

     

    G

     

  20. 44 minutes ago, Quetzalcoatl said:

    I didn't mean to denigrate the work you and Malban have done on Pitrex. I'm very appreciative of all the time and effort you two have put into all your projects. I also do not regret my purchase of the Pitrex at all, I'm very glad to have it and to be able to finally try some arcade emulation on Vectrex. As for needing more programmers, I can't help in that regard unfortunately, I can help with testing although I'm sure you guys have enough people already telling you what isn't working properly, etc. One weird bug I've encountered is that sometimes the menu system seems to stop allowing me to move the cursor above a certain game in the AAE menu and other menus (sometimes can't move left or right past certain games in the standalone binaries lists, etc). Like all of a sudden I can't move up above Star Wars in the list, for example. Also I'm not sure what a soft reset is supposed to do (Using the Vectrex reset button), but all it does for me is get a black screen. So I have to power off and on the system to reset the Pitrex. Otherwise I really like the interface you guys have for the Pitrex, it's very easy to navigate. If you ever need a new version tested of anything with the Pitrex, feel free to message me or post on here. QA is my background so I'm quite good at it, just never got into programming or scripting.

    No worries, I didn't take your comment as any sort of complaint, I just wanted to put in a good word for Thomas.

     

    We don't support soft reset, but there is an equivalent button combination on the controller that should work.  It'll be in Malban's documentation.

     

    Best place for support questions is the mailing list.

     

    G

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