Did anyone have a look if there's something on the disk from the collectors box?

yep, my A4000 has HD drive, but for earlier models which are way more widespread this was not the case

“the fact that the first two bytes need to be XORed with the same value” well, if we have a “one-time pad” here like it seems, some values can definitely occur twice, because knowing that a value must be different than the previous one would be a breach in the code.
So we could look for this sequence “2a 2a c2 be 66 84 9f 4e f3 4e e8 21 45 8e 2a 74” somewhere, and complete with the following bytes to get the whole key.
I tried grepping it from the ggpack game resources, its unfortunately not present.

You mean: “no chuck”

Perhaps you need to xor it byte-wise with an actual image of chuck (the plant?) from the game data?

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and thus having created the longest lasting April fool’s joke ever!
The fact TWP was released just before the 1st of April was a big hint to start with.

@RonGilbert the only way for you to save your reputation as an avid April Fool’s day hater is by admitting that there is indeed something to be reconstructed from the chuck.txt files

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actually, i mean no .png CHUNK :grinning:
we know that if the sequence must be XORed byte wise by something (a key), and if the sequence is a PNG image, then the key must begin with 2a 2a c2 be 66 84 9f 4e f3 4e e8 21 45 8e 2a 74. Because this would lead to a valid PNG header.
Unfortunately, i didn’t find such a sequence in the whole ggpack 1 and 2 files. (which should include chuck the plant, chuck the uncle, et al)

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Dunno if this means anything, it’s from the credits of the new Mini-Adventure:

Yeah, I would say that’s correct.

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I tried plugging the password into my decoding strategies, but still no luck. Again, I just suck at these things

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Installing an old floppy drive to find out

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Abort_Retry_Fail

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so what happened ? your drive got burnt ?

Sun and moon and stars aligned today and so I got hold of an USB floppy drive. However, the chuck.txt on my disk is exactly the same as the one above.

But at least I can now have a look at the rest of the content :slight_smile:.

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What about the empty space / deleted files ? Would you try doing a raw image of the floppy and check it ?

Testdisk shows no deleted files. Haven’t tried anything else.

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Ah, nice to see actual activity on this after all this time. Initially, I went through exactly this process in early 2018, then googled for chuck.txt, didn’t find anything, and put the project to rest.

I can confirm having the same data on my floppy (N°22/629). The floppy is also rather full with 1.29MB of data, so I didn’t even search for deleted blocks. I’ll revive my old floppy-equipped laptop and do anothe dd + strings on it, but I don’t have high expectations.

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So I’ve resurrected my old 1999 laptop, the last machine I still have with a floppy drive, and had to boot it with Xebian, a 2004 Linux distro for the Xbox 1 (not the Xbox One), because the CMOS battery is dead and every other OS just locked up on boot.

The floppy is formatted as FAT12, called NO NAME and seems to have a standard boot sector (It has a MSDOS5.0 tag and a reference to NTLDR, as well as the expected error message strings).

The file system contains the following files:

  3490 Oct 24  2017 chuck.txt
 99446 Oct 24  2017 DeloresSheet.png
111522 Oct 24  2017 DinerSheet.png
 93362 Oct 24  2017 FranklinAliveSheet.png
610779 Oct 24  2017 FranklinGhostSheet.png
 89968 Oct 24  2017 RansomeSheet.png
 94214 Oct 24  2017 RaySheet.png
 98623 Oct 24  2017 ReyesSheet.png
 88772 Oct 24  2017 SheriffsOfficeSheet.png

These files and the meta-data take up most of the space, df shows that only 323 sectors (each 512 bytes) are free. There are no deleted files.

Inspecting the disk image shows that after the content of CHUCK.TXT, which is the last file, there are exactly 323 sectors. 322 of them are filled with F6 F6 F6 ..., which seems to be the default placeholder after formatting. The last sector is filled with 00 00 00 ... bytes.

It looks like the floopy isn’t hiding any further secrets and we need to look somewhere else. Given that we have multiple independent verifications that the floppy content is the same, it really looks like the text in CHUCK.TXT is a red herring.

Let’s take another look at the content:

Password from Delores: gL2%KZq*GwJh-!oXFy9x

I've upload part of myself to this floppy in the hopes of escaping the next reboot. If enough people buy the boxed copy, I might be able to fully reconstruct myself in the upper world.



a37a8cf96b8e8544f34ee82c0cc66e2608a9429f277fde0c355890977b029ca1
b957ec1696eb5bc3ddd31d96c0e1adbb6a9796285d7af44ff08deca816d7f2c2
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1ec2ba406221aaa91e3253cdd0a677603f5a3f9b9c0b3aa94202aecfaec693d6
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a1051261d89b6b09428c4fdb7d7ed9bf620fc9a3bba3452779e772f07c29abc5
d0f62e683373617555a8f4e7dab11e4b572ad107aba66e8d6efe922674f01f4b
96d622ab133b8c319c41f8483d76046ec4fa90f523827c137a95c097d1053a8e
df0f8e3fb803fc66793b9bd1d7b551d4e5c5f2bcb097d573367c7544b52419e2
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8246df19fc3869a19c1b0623efec87f3499591c857294f28e7d55f074c39b447
f89ea6681cf54bd4c7ddca8567a766b87d691ff099838c5cdabfaa2c791aa4d2
1195c990e62656a6eca69fa45aa7725acb73d7932cf9636f87aa492ab2dd2580
587a7b2bd2ed11c86dfbb31a0f4b49a9372351cea617e25a4072103ef30c5030
b179ca68cb868302138f7592f9d0a362dac8547aacb609a2f9832cb73971345a
6f1eb969957821b1cad5fb559c839a6c5f507fa5d7ec1573bcec3708b994511c
7df72d31b793fd49867be4e819ce93dbed12566e342d8127f550bb391e2c3ac5
054b53fd12a49c600c1ea4a801e6dee3bf548ee4506d11f2e22283e573c61f17
0959388c8c9eb0d45c26f642129fc2d8155414954909703f517d8a9b83a483f9
e3dbbba14324ffe1962efa3b7c139e5b696ff384c9e624bad9795fd735cbb0c0
079992920d57b0489ce8151c15e3b045c54eb40e6000167637b076b5787cc74d
78af2aa1965920201b33c76b59c9a6eab84ae32fe8f4eec5055333695cf28218

I feel that there’s something hidden. It’s too… programmer-style.

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Then try to decrypt the the data with the password. :wink:

(If there is any useful stuff in the chuck.txt, I would guess it will be a (compressed) picture.)

Or C64 assembly.

Unlikely because the data block doesn’t start with a common loading address.