@User: Okay, that doesn't work as I described it. . . the problem is that the confusion is between the "/" characters in the instance name and the "/" characters that magic adds for the hierarchy. When both appear in the "merge" lines in the .ext file outputs, ext2spice gets very confused. I can probably fix this in magic by making sure that all slash characters in instance names get escaped in the .ext file. They can be un-escaped by ext2spice when it writes out the netlist. That should keep it from being confused. I'm going to give that a try and report if it works.