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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: General » Old News & Rumors
[TRAILHEAD] Half-Life 2 EP2: Binary Noise [UNSOLVED]
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Hacksaw
Kilroy

Joined: 12 Sep 2006
Posts: 1

 		 [TRAILHEAD] Half-Life 2 EP2: Binary Noise [UNSOLVED]
Valve is at it again! Some interesting files have shown up inside the materials.gcf file located inside the install path for Episode 2. If everyone is familiar with the Alien Swarm file, they have done this before. This ARG has been around for awhile but no one took notice of it so it's still unsolved. Maybe everyone here can put there brilliant heads together and crack the code!

Anyway, the 3 files that are located inside the materials.gcf are listed below with links to each picture.

- binary_noise_R_01
- binary_noise_G_01
- binary_noise_B_01

This is the standard RGB Color Model, so when the three images are combined they make binary.
- RGB Combined


Binary from Image
Code:
11001000111001001001001000
00100011100100100100100010
111100100011100100100100100
10011111001000111001001001
100101001001101011101010100
011011011010010100100110101

Please Note: For some reason other users have been getting different results from typing out the binary. I personally typed this binary off the image twice to make sure it is correct. I could be wrong, but I am fairly sure this is the correct one.

Image Binary In 8-Bit Format
Code:
11001000
11100100
10010010
00001000
11100100
10010010
00101111
00100011
10010010
01001001
00111110
01000111
00100100
11001010
01001101
01110101
01000110
11011010
01010010
0110101? <- Missing Byte


Image Binary In 16-Bit Format
Code:
1100100011100100
1001001000001000
1110010010010010
0010111100100011
1001001001001001
0011111001000111
0010010011001010
0100110101110101
0100011011011010
010100100110101? <- Missing Byte


Image Binary In 32-Bit Format
Code:
11001000111001001001001000001000
11100100100100100010111100100011
10010010010010010011111001000111
00100100110010100100110101110101
0100011011011010010100100110101? <- Missing Byte


Please Note: This missing byte could be located ANYWHERE in the binary. So, this could be useful but at the same time useless depending on how you can use it.

Original Binary Converted
Code:
HEX
c8 e4 92 08 e4 92 2f 23 92 49 3e 47 24 ca 4d 75 46 da 52 35

BASE64
yOSSCOSSLyOSST5HJMpNdUbaUjU=

DEC / CHAR
200 228 146 8 228 146 47 35 146 73 62 71 36 202 77 117 70 218 82 53

MD2
c6fcd1532ebf52748cd6da745b029242

MD4
47f07b8993730be082a784693392508f

MD5
adb804b20f60bab605f3ebd26f25666


Binary Converted With 0 As Missing Byte At End
Code:
HEX
c8 e4 92 08 e4 92 2f 23 92 49 3e 47 24 ca 4d 75 46 da 52 6a

BASE64
yOSSCOSSLyOSST5HJMpNdUbaUmo=

DEC / CHAR
200 228 146 8 228 146 47 35 146 73 62 71 36 202 77 117 70 218 82 106

MD2
2c1a0f44ef74066e4f7953dcc7af92e2

MD4
e4faa560c4f4b3267ae6f03b2a314eab

MD5
f8f1a44ba77812e6911e8f39bda29fe6


Binary Converted With 1 As Missing Byte At End
Code:
HEX
c8 e4 92 08 e4 92 2f 23 92 49 3e 47 24 ca 4d 75 46 da 52 6b

BASE64
yOSSCOSSLyOSST5HJMpNdUbaUms=

DEC / CHAR
200 228 146 8 228 146 47 35 146 73 62 71 36 202 77 117 70 218 82 107

MD2
0b5f44566685fa84c2fe390893b38b44

MD4
4768988c4b97b731fb2e23b5154f11b3

MD5
6a3685e742d409d6a42a58dec0b5a8b5


Other Sites Working On The ARG
Steam Forums
Reddit Gaming
Youtube Video
Please Note: The above sites are getting different binary when typing out. Again, I double checked mine so it should be correct. If not, please let me know.

Added Notes
- I have tried translating the original binary as well with adding a 0 or 1 to the missing byte but it does not yield any binary to text conversion. It's just gibberish. BUT please, do not hesitate to try it yourself maybe its gibberish to me but might not be to you.
- Sadly, this is all I have for now.

PostPosted: Sun Feb 13, 2011 1:03 pm
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zerocool
Guest
Code:
11001000111001001001001000
00100011100100100100100010
111100100011100100100100100
100111111001000111001001001
100101001001101011101010100
011011011010010100100110101
is the correct transcription. 4th row you were missing a 1. As far as anything else, I'm at a loss.

PostPosted: Sun Feb 13, 2011 5:17 pm
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thebruce
Dances With Wikis


Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 6899
Location: Kitchener, Ontario

 		If taken as 5-bit (useful for 1-26 encoding of A-Z), all values fall between 1-26, with one exception, 28.

Quote:
25 3 18 9 4 2 7 4 18 8 23 18 7 4 18 9 7 28 17 25 4 25 9 6 23 10 17 22 26 10 9 21

Curious...

Converted to letters and rotted but found no grammatically feasible result
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 11:42 am
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Talaisan
Veteran

Joined: 17 Jun 2007
Posts: 134
Location: Billings, MT

 		Has anyone tried translating it as morse code, perhaps. dot-dash, rather than 1-0?
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 4:05 pm
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Minz
Decorated

Joined: 12 Apr 2009
Posts: 183

 		I'm still not really convinced that this even is an ARG (or has any meaning whatsoever) but I would really like to see an Episode 3 ARG.

Possible Evidence against this being an ARG :
A Google search for the filenames turns up several file indexes from servers running with the orangebox files. Whats odd though is that there are servers displaying a last modified date of early 2009 for those very files.
Take a look at this one for example :
http://gry.milowice.net/srcds/orangebox/diprip/materials/effects/

This would mean that either the time on that server is completely off, or the files have been inside those GCFs since at least 26-Feb-2009, in which case I dont think they are really relevant to Episode 3.

Nevertheless a took a few shots at the binary and the images in the hope there might still be something to find and this is what i got so far:

binary transcribed rows reading left->right; top->down
Code:
11001000 11100100 10010010 00-
00100011 10010010 01001000 10-
11110010 00111001 00100100 100
10011111 10010001 11001001 001
10010100 10011010 11101010 100
01101101 10100101 00100110 101


minus'es indicate the missing(?) numbers

transcribed columns reading top->down; left->right
Code:
101110
101001
011001
001110
100101
000111
011100
010101
110111
100000
101001
011110
001010
100001
010010
001101
100110
010110
001011
100000
010110
001001
100011
000100
011011
000000
--0101


Other things that did not provide any meaningful information :
(at least to me)

Quote:
Binary 2 decimal;
Binary 2 ASCII;
Binary 2 HEX;
Binary 2 DEC CHAR (8bit/char) and overhead numbers mod(26);
Hex is an IPv6 adress ? -> No, to many characters

Possible bit-pairs :

2 bit : 160/2 = 80 // How to map to an alphabet with only 6 combinations?
4 bit : 160/4 = 40 // maybe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal
5 bit : 160/5 = 32 // if true then message encoded
8 bit : 160/8 = 20 // if true then message encoded (mod26;overhead?)
10 bit : 160/10 = 16 // if true then message encoded (mod26;overhead?)
16 bit : 160/16 = 10 // if true then message encoded (mod26;overhead?)
20 bit : 160/20 = 8 //not enough letters to spell something meaningful?
32 bit : 160/32 = 5 //not enough letters to spell something meaningful?
40 bit : 160/40 = 4 //not enough letters to spell something meaningful?
80 bit : 160/80 = 2 //not enough letters to spell something meaningful?


After hitting that roadblock I started examining the patterns in the files and tried some overlaying (see attached image)
binary_shift.jpg
 Description   shifting and overlaying rows
 Filesize   115.98KB
 Viewed   112 Time(s)

binary_shift.jpg

PostPosted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 6:56 pm
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AzureWolf
Entrenched


Joined: 23 May 2008
Posts: 764

 		OP made his first post 5 years after registering? That is weird.

But yeah you missed a 1 on row 4, 6 1's in a row and you have 5.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:41 pm
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