I believe the problem is now fixed - I used the support of my card's manufacturers.
I needed a new target configuration specific to my card, and I needed to NOT select "Project/Debug" but instead to Right click on the new target config file and select "Launch Selected Configuration". From there, I will load my program (.out file) to the DSP cores on my card.
For reference of this forum: I am using the Advantech DSPC-8681 card with C6678 DSPs and the Blackhawk USB560v2 System Trace JTAG emulator.