Mmmmhmmm… I think there was a Simpson quote about this…
@Guga? @milanfahrnholz?
Anyway, if it is so, I think the mistery will never be solved!
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You know what? When I received my box and I saw it was signed, for a veeeery long moment I asked myself: are the signatures on the wrap or on the box?
Luckily they were on the box.
It would have been very sadistic of them signing the wraps 
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that’s why I hadn’t opened it before…
And now it is signed on said foil by David too.
But I do probably have another of the 5000 chuck.txt files that, when all combined, will unveil the next game by Terrible Toybox. Or the Secret of Thimbleweed Island.
Or… there are only 4 different files, which combined create the map to Big Whoop
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Don’t think so, because of the “If enough people buy the boxed copy” sentence.
This could also allude to “more people looking at the file. the higher the chance someone manages to decipher it”.
With a bit of luck we’ll see come Friday. Though I was really expecting to find Disk 156/629 or thereabouts. But if the labels are the same, I cannot imagine that the contents are different. It would be awesome, no doubt, but not sure if the economics of disk duplication would have allowed for that. (Who’s even manufacturing those relics of the past nowadays?)
Not that much to tell, really. No shaking, sweaty hands or such, no racing heart (other than from climbing 3 flights of stairs, that is 
).
Though I must say looking at the map and the newspaper made me chuckle. And wonder if anyone would dare cut out that slip and mail it to the Pulitzer Price Judging Board (if there is such a thing, and if that is the legitimate address). All in all, I am happy to have it open, even if there doesn’t seem to be an elaborate puzzle hidden on the floppy.
The operation to re-apply the sticker went smooth as well. It was easy to peel and still sticky enough to reattach without additional adhesive.
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I’ve just put it in the box. So I have a “clean” box and the sticker. 
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Yeah, that makes sense, too. I wanted to have it on the box for that more authentic feel, though. Games back then did have those stickers after all. And like @Sushi it was the main reason for not unwrapping it in the first place.
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I suspect that all was studied. I mean, the stickers were super easy to detach from the foil and transfer on the box. I suppose they were on the wrap in order not to damage the box if the collector wanted it inviolate. But easy to detach if the collector wanted to stick them on the box (or onto the new wrap after secretly opening the box while wearing gloves, mask and a bio suit).
I’m happy I unwrapped mine and stuck the two stickers on the box. So I can open it from time to time and have a peek at its contents.
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I forgot to make a nerdish confession: i scanned the box after unwrapping and prior to put the stickers back on.
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Good point.
So, let’s try to understand if the numbers make sense.
First of all, they’re all hex values. I tried putting them as bytes, but the file means nothing. A3 7A 8C F9 6B isn’t a known file signature.
So I supposed you have to decode them. But I XORed the whole file with values from 0 to 255 and none of them mean anything too.
TWP files aren’t XORed with a single value, though. Every byte is XORed with a different value that depends on different factors. So I thought, maybe we need to do something similar for this file.
I saved all 256 different variations of the file and checked if some of them can be merged into a known format. Suppose the file is a PNG. Then you’d expect the first 4 bytes to be 89 50 4E 47. So if I find a file where the first value is 89, another where the second is 50, another where the third is 4E and another where the fourth is 47, then I’d know there is a series of values for which a changing XOR gives us a meaningful PNG file.
But of course they exist. If I XORed all bytes with all possible values, every file has a different value on the first byte.
In fact, I could reconstruct the 8-byte PNG magic number by taking the bytes from the files 42, 42, 194, 190, 102, 132, 159, 78.
However, the fact that the first two bytes need to be XORed with the same value makes me think this is not a meaningful sequence. And even if it were, how can I extract the other values to recompute the whole image?
So, for now, the only thing I have is that it’s 1600 bytes.
Long story short, I suck at decoding things.
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Yes.
.
We are all Chuck.
It’s just unfathomable to think what’s on next level.
There’s a forum out there trying to decypher what we are writing here 
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Bad news everyone: checking the manual turns out my board (ASUS Z97-P) does not have a floppy connector.
Not all is lost, however. I think we have a USB floppy drive in the office (one of our suppliers used to ship the software for their $100k component on a single 3½" disk!). Might take a while to get a hold of that, though. Chances that our IT guy and I are present at the same time are slim in the foreseeable future.
Hey, we have (almost) the same motherboard!
Edit: ASUS Z97-A and ASUS Z97-AR. I guess it’s a tiny bit nicer.
Yeah, the -P is more of a bargain model. When it comes to PC components, I don’t feel like spending more than €100 for a board.
What about an USB drive?
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