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MESS: PC and hard disk
#362987 - 01/27/17 11:16 AM
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363017 - 01/28/17 12:10 PM
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I'll use the IBM XT (ibm5160 driver) as a reference ...
You should have some floppy boot disk images ready that contain the relevant DOS tools (FDISK and FORMAT).
You will also need to have the MAME tools compiled, specifically CHDMAN.
Then create a 20MB HD image called "test.chd" (or whatever) using
Code:
chdman createhd -o test.chd -chd 615,4,17
The newly created HD image is equivalent to mounting a Seagate ST225 MFM harddisk in your physical PC.
start your emulation with
Code:
mess64 ibm5160
(Your executable could also be called mame64 or a 32 bit variant, but you already have floppy loading running, so you know what to use)
Then SCRLCK-TAB into the internal menu, go to file manager and load test.chd in the hard disk controller, your bootable DOS installation disk in the floppy drive and reset the emulation.
The emulated PC-XT should boot from the floppy. Then you can use FDISK to create a partition, reboot and format it with "FORMAT c: /s".
Once that is done remember to remove your floppy disk image from the drive and reset - voila!
The harddisk can be specified from the command line:
Code:
mess64 ibm5160 -hard1 test.chd
but you might have to add the path to the harddisk file (for test purposes this was just created in the same directory where the MAME executable resides).
If you are using a different machine than IBM XT / ibm5160 you might find that you have to add a hard disk controller in one of the ISA slots (SCRLCK-TAB, Slots) or that the machine still has some quirks. Please tell us about your experiences!
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: rfka01]
#363024 - 01/28/17 02:54 PM
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Adding to the well detailed explanation I might correct a typo. You can create a hard drive file with either the -chs parameter (cilinders, head, sectors) or the -s parameter, just specify the size in bytes divisible by 512.
For instance "chdman createhd -o ibm5150.chd -s 20971520" creates a 20MB hard drive too, however the CHS values are different and I can't test right now how compatible is with such older computer. I have the habit of renaming my hard drives including the set, chs values and size for easy reference. So my newly generated "ibm5150.chd" turns into "ibm5150_C64_H16_S40_20MB.chd" now.
If you don't want to add the hard drive each time nor type a long parameter list, you can create a custom ini file. Just type something like "mame64.exe ibm5150 -cc" and rename the newly generated mame.ini file to ibm5150.ini, then keep only the values you want to get changed. For example:
Code:
#
# CORE MISC OPTIONS
#
confirm_quit 1
#
# SLOT DEVICES
#
isa5 sblaster1_5
#
# IMAGE DEVICES
#
harddisk1 ibm5150_C64_H16_S40_20MB.chd
This one adds a sound card, the hard drive and prevents from you accidentally ending emulation while switching between full and partial keyboard emulation.
One more thing. For compatibility reasons the softlist gives you different diskette images depending on you choosing between 5.25" and 3.5" drives. If one diskette gives you read errors, switch between "dd" and "hd" version types on "Slot devices" when available.
EDIT: BTW, bannister has a dedicated topic about installing Operative Systems on MESS now MAME computers.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: BIOS-D]
#363086 - 01/30/17 12:58 PM
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363103 - 01/31/17 04:40 AM
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So far the most modern I've managed to run are the first Tomb Raider and C&C DOS games. In fact I think anything that doesn't require SVGA modes will work fine without the screen glitching. I can't properly run Windows 3.1x or 95 above 16 color resolutions, you need to remove the mouse before attempting to install Win 3.1x or it will freeze. I would like to enable floppy drive sounds on the driver, but I'm too lazy to re-compile for now. However I think the support so far is pretty decent to run the basics.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: BIOS-D]
#363139 - 02/01/17 07:15 PM
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Your suggestion about disabling the mouse for Win 3.1 made a difference. I don't know enough about hardware to comment about the emulation. I know that original Wing Commander runs too fast on at386 to be playable, but WC Privateer runs slow and choppy on at586. That series always was a pain in the ass to get running when they released them. Every other DOS game I have seems to run fine on at386.
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----------------------
I have officially retired from sucking at everything I do. Life is much easier now.
My MAME/MESS artwork files: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ABxeKgNIrKlIsyck7dx4V241NFQDWAF4
Related screen shots: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1U5IbvbVzYW97PuOOQuocvZFE_YJz7WIn
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363140 - 02/01/17 10:02 PM
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> That series always was a pain in the ass to get running when they released them.
I think that was true for every origin game.
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| Moose |
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Don't make me assume my ultimate form!
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: lharms]
#363145 - 02/02/17 01:18 PM
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> > That series always was a pain in the ass to get running when they released them.
>
> I think that was true for every origin game.
Yep, the art of creating boot disks - and making changes to the boot to suit particular games - is becoming a lost art.
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Moose
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Moose]
#363146 - 02/02/17 02:55 PM
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> > > That series always was a pain in the ass to get running when they released them.
> >
> > I think that was true for every origin game.
>
> Yep, the art of creating boot disks - and making changes to the boot to suit
> particular games - is becoming a lost art.
I dunno, have you seen the way we tune our servers for different workloads? Filesystem block size, network I/O buffers, address space reserved for huge pages, manual interrupt routing, NUMA binding, thread/core affinity, TCP offload, zero-copy raw sockets, JIT-compiled BPF… It's a bit different to tuning DOS, but it's even more intricate.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: BIOS-D]
#363287 - 02/07/17 04:55 AM
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363290 - 02/07/17 06:05 AM
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Its been awhile (like 20+years) since I have done anything like that. But if you post your autoexec.bat and config.sys files someone in here may be able to help?
Also these may help some. http://madsenworld.dk/con_auto/index-uk.htm http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=26435
Also for some reason in the back of my head I am thinking the cd driver was kinda of big in memory with some versions of it and you had to play memory jenga to get it just right. But that could just be my creaky old memory playing tricks on me.
Dont remember correctly, but you may be able to specify where in memory things land? It could be it is just not able to find a spot in memory for it. http://www.computerhope.com/lhhlp.htm
This is also popping up in my memory but you had to play around with where emm386 ends up or you could end up with it not working quite right? Like I said it has been awhile.
Also the command 'mem /c /p' may be helpful. http://www.computerhope.com/memhlp.htm
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363292 - 02/07/17 06:44 AM
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I'll be honest here. Even when I played a lot with config files and read the whole MS-DOS manual at 14 years old, I still have not idea about how memory works. When I had "out of memory" errors I simply tried combinations like "DOS=HIGH,UMB", "DEVICEHIGH=", "FILES=40", etc. without knowing its true meaning. If anything didn't work I simply gave up, it was not like I could run anything important with only 4MB/8MB of RAM anyway. Then WinME came and forgot all about that. I can't even remember how I managed to run NEOGEO driver with KOF9x on MAME with my crappy 486DX PC, I only remember I let it loading before going to sleep and the thing was finally running at 2 or so FPS the morning after.
Maybe it's time to give it a try to such missing concepts now that I can freely adjust memory with a ramsize parameter, instead of fitting 4 same size memories in slots. But for now I can't be of any help.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363304 - 02/07/17 07:25 PM
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Nightvoice, I think the PC driver that allows for most versatility is ct486.
at586, i.e. a Pentium PCI system, is not as complete IIRC. Maybe a dev can clarify.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: rfka01]
#363315 - 02/08/17 01:36 AM
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One simple question about how the hard disk works.
Playing a at486 with msdos 6.22, I've noticed that when you make some change in the hardisk, a diff file is created, and if you delete this diff file, all the changes are lost.
Is any way to integrate the diff file in the chd? I ask this because I add files to the chd converting it to raw and using WinImage, so when I put the chd back in the folder, an error message "invalid file parent" appears and I have to delete the diff file in order to get the machine working...
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RETRODANUART.COM
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Sthiryu]
#363316 - 02/08/17 01:41 AM
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> One simple question about how the hard disk works.
>
> Playing a at486 with msdos 6.22, I've noticed that when you make some change in the
> hardisk, a diff file is created, and if you delete this diff file, all the changes
> are lost.
>
> Is any way to integrate the diff file in the chd? I ask this because I add files to
> the chd converting it to raw and using WinImage, so when I put the chd back in the
> folder, an error message "invalid file parent" appears and I have to delete the diff
> file in order to get the machine working...
you can use
chdman copy
with
--input, -i : input file name (required)
--inputparent, -ip : parent file name for input CHD
and
--output, -o : output file name (required)
I seem to recall that you use the .dif file with -i and the .chd file with -ip and the new file you want to create with -o
Edited by Haze (02/08/17 01:42 AM)
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: rfka01]
#363317 - 02/08/17 04:30 AM
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> Nightvoice, I think the PC driver that allows for most versatility is ct486.
> at586, i.e. a Pentium PCI system, is not as complete IIRC. Maybe a dev can clarify.
I tried ct486 today, and I couldn't even get it to access EMS memory via emm386.exe; when using a boot disk, it straight up freezes. It was worth a try, though.
I finally got SimCity to run on at586 using the svga_s3 driver, and it's actually playable. Ran into some problems with it not "seeing" the extra ram or reading params from the .ini file, but these were solved by launching it from a command prompt and adding "-isa2 sblaster_16" and "-ram 64M" to the end.
Privateer is still slow and studderish, but at least it still runs fine on DOSBox for now.
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----------------------
I have officially retired from sucking at everything I do. Life is much easier now.
My MAME/MESS artwork files: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ABxeKgNIrKlIsyck7dx4V241NFQDWAF4
Related screen shots: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1U5IbvbVzYW97PuOOQuocvZFE_YJz7WIn
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363328 - 02/08/17 04:57 PM
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I think your problem is you need another DOS Extender like CWSDPMI, DOS32A or DOS4GW. Reading now about how DOS memory work I kinda understand why I needed such programs (specially with emulators) back in the day.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Haze]
#363344 - 02/09/17 01:40 AM
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: BIOS-D]
#363347 - 02/09/17 06:26 AM
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> I think your problem is you need another DOS Extender like CWSDPMI, DOS32A or DOS4GW.
> Reading now about how DOS memory work I kinda understand why I needed such programs
> (specially with emulators) back in the day.
I may have this wrong. It has been awhile. But I think those will not help him. I think programs would use those as an overlay file and then get EMS or XMS out of the way and do it themselves. Sometimes they would barf if himem or EMS was loaded and you have to get creative. Usually if the software needed those it was installed next to it. Usually a sign of a watcom compiler program. What he is trying to do (I think) is use LH and DEVICEHIGH to get more start up memory. I think for lh/devicehigh to work you need himem.sys loaded. I could have that wrong though.
I tried the same emu at586. I then installed DOS622. Just default I was able to get it up to 599K free using the built in memmaker. Which usually does a semi crummy job. By default it also installs smartdrive which probably could get me 10-15 more K just by getting rid of that. Probably do not really need it due to the real OS doing caching. I probably could get a few more K by using DOS=HIGH,UMB Prob could get a bit more using 4DOS. But that can be a bit wonky sometimes with compatibility. The best I ever got I think was about 612k free.
There used to be a nice norton 5 util that showed the memory layout which was really handy for figuring out where in memory to put things.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: lharms]
#363350 - 02/09/17 09:18 AM
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> I tried the same emu at586. I then installed DOS622. Just default I was able to get
> it up to 599K free using the built in memmaker. Which usually does a semi crummy job.
> By default it also installs smartdrive which probably could get me 10-15 more K just
> by getting rid of that. Probably do not really need it due to the real OS doing
> caching. I probably could get a few more K by using DOS=HIGH,UMB Prob could get a bit
> more using 4DOS. But that can be a bit wonky sometimes with compatibility. The best I
> ever got I think was about 612k free.
I tried all of these and got similar results. It's no longer an issue of what will run or what won't, but how it performs. Unless they make changes to the environment itself, I don't see how to get around that. Thatz why they give you the dreaded red screen on startup--it's not finished.
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| Moose |
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Don't make me assume my ultimate form!
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Vas Crabb]
#363351 - 02/09/17 10:11 AM
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> > > > That series always was a pain in the ass to get running when they released
> them.
> > >
> > > I think that was true for every origin game.
> >
> > Yep, the art of creating boot disks - and making changes to the boot to suit
> > particular games - is becoming a lost art.
>
> I dunno, have you seen the way we tune our servers for different workloads?
> Filesystem block size, network I/O buffers, address space reserved for huge pages,
> manual interrupt routing, NUMA binding, thread/core affinity, TCP offload, zero-copy
> raw sockets, JIT-compiled BPF… It's a bit different to tuning DOS, but it's even more
> intricate.
For sure, agree 100%. But, I wasn't talking about sys admins / configuration experts ... I was referring more to PC games players in general. In the "old days", everyone had to know how to create the right boot environment for many games, or they had to know someone who knew about this. (I'm talking mid-early 1990's and before). PC Magazines offered a lot of advice to help people maximise their UMB, conventional memory, etc to make it so that specific games could be played. It was fun times.
Now all people need to do is install the game, download 100's of MB of updates, and play. It's much easier (and the way things should work).
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Nightvoice]
#363369 - 02/09/17 09:47 PM
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Yeah with DOS=HIGH,UMB and ditching smartdrv I was able to get it to 610k free. Not too shabby.
I played a bit with unthrottling it. The *best* I could get on my computer is 200%. Many times it would dip into the 60s. But yeah the driver/cpu/graphics prob need a bit of TLC in the optimization area. Been meaning to benchmark it using visual studio and find the hotspots. Just have not got around to it. Though the other guys here probably would have a much better insight into what needs to be done.
Another interesting x86 emu you may want to look at is bochs. http://bochs.sourceforge.net/ Now that MAME is GPL/BSD it may be worth looking at if there is anything in there worth merging. But being diff architectures it may be a dead end. It does have one of the more interesting x86 decoders I have seen using a variation of duffs device.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: lharms]
#363375 - 02/10/17 08:14 AM
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In addition to that, people forget about the existence of PCem which has working 3dfx voodoo 1 emulation (voodoo 2 in the developmental version) emulation: http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: APN]
#363376 - 02/10/17 10:46 AM
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> In addition to that, people forget about the existence of PCem which has working 3dfx
> voodoo 1 emulation (voodoo 2 in the developmental version) emulation:
> http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/
Which was taken from MAME.
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Stiletto |
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They're always after me Lucky ROMS!
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: MooglyGuy]
#363382 - 02/10/17 05:27 PM
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> > In addition to that, people forget about the existence of PCem which has working
> 3dfx
> > voodoo 1 emulation (voodoo 2 in the developmental version) emulation:
> > http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/
>
> Which was taken from MAME.
By way of DOSBox, which had our permission. That code was dual-licensed MAME license and BSD LONG before the MAME relicensing project.
I've looked briefly at PCem's Voodoo code and while you can still trace its provenance, it's not all that recognizable any more. They even have a "recompiler".
- Stiletto
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: APN]
#363395 - 02/11/17 02:49 AM
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Again, it's not that there aren't other emulators out there that work well. It's just that I like MAME's options and would rather use it for everything I can. It's not just PC games; there are numerous other half-MAMEd systems for which alternatives exist. Doesn't mean I wouldn't give a testicle to have them run on MAME with equal performance.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Stiletto]
#363401 - 02/11/17 03:12 PM
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> By way of DOSBox, which had our permission. That code was dual-licensed MAME license
> and BSD LONG before the MAME relicensing project.
>
> I've looked briefly at PCem's Voodoo code and while you can still trace its
> provenance, it's not all that recognizable any more. They even have a "recompiler".
Wasn't trying to cast shade on the emulator itself, just point out the oddness of mentioning that it supports the Voodoo card.
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Sthiryu]
#363504 - 02/13/17 11:23 PM
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> One simple question about how the hard disk works.
>
> Playing a at486 with msdos 6.22, I've noticed that when you make some change in the
> hardisk, a diff file is created, and if you delete this diff file, all the changes
> are lost.
Create the CHD with -c none (no compression) and writes will go directly to it.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: R. Belmont]
#363514 - 02/14/17 04:12 AM
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Good to know that, the problem was that I get the hard disk already created, so I'll keep in mind to the future...
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: Sthiryu]
#363527 - 02/14/17 06:26 PM
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> Good to know that, the problem was that I get the hard disk already created, so I'll
> keep in mind to the future...
You can use chdman as described to merge the diffs, and then to copy the compressed disk to an uncompressed one.
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Re: MESS: PC and hard disk
[Re: R. Belmont]
#363531 - 02/14/17 10:55 PM
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Yes, that was I was thinking about...thanks again 
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