Congrats and a bump for the US crowd.


Good night.

Well, got to spend about an hour on it. First step is easy enough.

Then only a few minutes to find the general pattern and a few hidden messages. Poked at it for quite a while but still a bit stumped on what the next operation would be.

Haven't found Gandalf either. ;) But I couldn't actually watch the clip - kid is sleeping in the next room. Tried the closed captioning for it and it was waaay off on most of the dialogue. Whether or not the dialogue is relevant anyway.

Written on the stone in some language: "To enter, say the password"

Gandalf: "Ugh Trarara la!" - nothing
Gandalf: "Lala lalala la umg lala la!" - nothing

6 hours later.
Frodo: "THE PASSWORD!"
Stone opens.

hah. Here is a funnier version for those who speak Polish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1WyFbzGvG0

I'll add another meta hint.

This puzzle is mainly about the "isoterism" thingy. Not about encryption, linguistics, mathematics or anything else. It might require you to do stuff from other fields, but if so just the basics. If you find yourself going too deep into other fields, you're most probably on the wrong track.

Well, I stopped after I was unable to find anything the second output . I know the 97/3 rule, which means the task will probably stop you in dead tracks end when its solved to 97% (I once had 72 hour non-stop hackaton in java), but I tried bitshift over existing static data to no avail.
In Linux kernel terminology, I went zombie and was killed. :)

You seem to have been very very close from what you've said... it did take me a bit to figure out exactly what was required from that point, but you've got all the clues and information you need.

Don't give up! :)

Thing is, everything until this point was a piece of cake, took about 10 minutes to figure out. But then ... after 5 hours I gave up :) Maybe I should do another look at it.

Meanwhile, something for you. Perhaps, you´ll like it. Its the artist who wrote most of tracks for Uplink. =)
You can easily mass-convert the tracks to OGG or any other format via this service.

Yeah, I got stuck there (I think it's the same point anyway) until ZFR put the LotR clue up which made me realise what I was doing wrong.

I have to say I've yet to play any of the various coding / hacking based games on GoG, though quite a few are on my wishlist. It's good, not quite my usual style of music though (more of a hard rock / grunge / punk kind of guy).

Can't send chat, but I must say that 1997 games was really good.

All right! I knew others would solve it too. I told you it's one of my favourite games.

My wife and me played it and the second one a lot.

Thank you for another great giveaway.

I'm interested, just have had only about 90 min. overall to work on it.

I do think even with esoterics there are some types of "keys" that will be broadly apparent, but also some that are knowledge-base specific For example, I have some facility with Euro languages, so the 'red herring' hint was easy to spot, though one could have seemingly bypassed that entirely just by observing the formatting of the mass of the wall and what is alike/different.

Looking at the resulting wall of text from the first operation I can see lots of "things" in it, but they all seem to point in different directions. Does the "au" suggest an atomic number, perhaps? Or does that approach run counter to your hint that, if we've gone too deep, we're going the wrong way? Perhaps that string points at Neil Young but what the heck would I do with that?

But I probably won't have time to tackle it any deeper than that til tomorrow.

Au is just a reference to GOLD. Nothing else there. Just my little joke.

You only need knowledge of esoteric programming languages. Anything else is probably extra fluff I put in. Getting atomic numbers of Au would be, like you said, going counter to my hint about not going too deep.

I think it's ok to make this hint public by now: that wall of text you come across is actually valid code.