‘Tis time for another give-away, methinks :) Below you find a fine piece of music that I recorded a few years ago. It may seem a bit monotonous, but it’s a secret beauty. If you tell me the message hidden therein, you can win one of these two prizes:
(1) A Retrode logo T-shirt, nice and golden
(2) A plug-in adapter for Nintendo 64 and Game Boy/GBColor/GBAdvance cartridges (currently in development and better looking than this one)
So, turn down the volume and download the piece here. As soon as you find the secret (you will KNOW when you’ve got it right), write me an e-mail and don’t forget to provide your address and T-Shirt size. Should you prefer either of the two prizes, feel free to give me a hint. Please don’t spoil the fun for all others by posting the solution somewhere.
Hints
- You won’t find out without doing some work on your own.
- If you win with the help of a friend, I’ll throw in another T-shirt for her or him. :)
- It’s neither FROM a video game nor FOR a video game. It does have SOMETHING to do with video gaming, but the relation is very remote and technical.
- The message is not audible, nor can it be made audible.
- Think of video games before people knew they even existed. Like, 40 years ago, when it was all analogue and stuff.
- See Hint 1.
- Some folks are actually starting to put their ears aside and look at it. Not too bad, not too bad.
- It is a stereo file.
- Last hint (3 folks have found the solution so far): What was that opposite of pixel/raster graphics again?
Closed one day before the deadline :-(
Oh, come on now! I did not receive a single answer (not even a wrong one) in the last 48 hours.
lol – I would of got it wrong anyway!
put it through a spectrogram
lol spoilers.
Does the answer require manipulation of the waveform data in order to be accessed?
If not, does the answer require a special method of observation to be accessed?
The wave of the sound reminds me of the map of that Defender game, but that wasn’t analogue, and I guess any sound wave would look like the map of Defender :)
yeah i thought so too but he said its not from or for a game
I’ve been looking at it since day 1 and it is very interesting, I have an idea of what you may be wanting but to relate it to anything with before video games is a mystery to me. Any clue to the answer topic e.g Science, Maths, Computing?
I’m guessing it needs to be properly viewed on a scope – specifically, with X-Y coordinates being fed to it from the left and right signals. Lissajous patterns. Sadly, I don’t have the right number of scope probes to examine this closer.
Can you give us any parameters to use?
Pong?
So, it’s not audible, therefore that must mean it’s hidden in the encoding of the file. But you said the file format had nothing to do with the riddle. So… =/ hmm…
Is the message audible, or is it hidden in the encoding somehow?
If it is audible, is it plain speech? Or some instrument/synth voice beating out a code?
You say its neither FROM a video game nor FOR a video game. Does this imply its nothing do to with video gaming? Now I love riddles, but this certainly confused me! Does anyone else think they know out of interest!
It’s a hard riddle, so no one should feel too bad if they don’t get it (yet). In fact, the solution requires a certain technical background. Feel free to ask the technically inclined among your friends for help (cf. Hint 2 :)) Again: don’t panic. You’ve got time until the 12th :)
Technical background, I may feel have an idea where this is going. Is there a particular topic the answer comes under e.g Science, Maths, Computing? Also where you say a distant relation and TECHNICAL, what way, hardware? I know someone ask is it country specific, but is there an age range which will know it?
> is there an age range which will know it?
“Your physics/EE teacher”, and perhaps their kids. Maybe one of them wants to win a T-shirt :)
Just out of curiosity, Is this country specific ?.
As in, You would have to reside in a particular
country to actually understand or be in the know of
this clue. Such as America, Europe, Asia etc ?.
Trooper
No.
Well I would certainly say its puzzle! I don’t know if I’m going to far but its seems very interesting hows its recorded. When’s the first clue?
I’ve tried a few very weird and exotic things so far, none of which have worked ;)
It’s probably something much simpler than what I’m doing, but my way is more fun :p
Are you going to say if the fact that it’s an MP3 is a part of it (it was obviously encoded by a machine rather than by hand – I can tell from the occasional mention of LAME) – or should it (and can it) be decoded? In other words, is the file format an essential part, or is it the audio data itself that’s the interesting thing?
MP3 is just for compression. It is not part of, nor does it affect the riddle in any way.
Ugh, MP3…
Yay, you’re making them you’re making them!
All I wrote is I’m making ONE, I’m making one! :-P
for someone smart enough to appreciate it…I get it I get it…
Is this morse or binary code or something? ^^
No :)