Mision Basic X6

[fashizzlepop]

Hey I tried to take everyone's advice and use a ASCII Table table but I can't seem to grasp how the table works

So you've read through ALL the other pages in this thread to try to understand this challenge?

Ya I skimmed through them but it's OK I'll just do guess and test

Good plan.

[Coltragon]

There is a bug in miossn 6.
I tried to enter 'abcdefghijklmnop' to see what happens to each letter. Because i thought it might be Rot13 or something, but it seems whenever you enter characters in alphabetical order, the encrypter cannot encrypt it.

It probaly has something to do with the way the encrypter encrypts it.

[fashizzlepop]

What do you mean it cannot encrypt it? Let me guess... it's spitting out 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'

[Norithez]

I swear I have decrypted the Sam's password but when I enter it, it says Error. When I enter the decrypted version of password and encrypt it, it comes out the same as Sam's password. First I basically just guessed until I saw a pattern, then when I figured out what I thought was the password and entered it. It doesn't work. I went through all the little threads about this mission. I really don't see what I'm doing wrong. If I could pm someone who has already finished this mission my answer and you just tell me if I'm right or wrong. That is all I need to know.

I type the decrypted password and pressed encrypt and it came out the same as Sam's password.
I type the same decrypted password and pressed submit and all i get is "Error! Sorry, but you have entered an incorrect password".

[littlemayhem]

loved this mission - awesome fun. I would have felt like I was cheating if I used a decoder - I mean, IRL that's the quickest way, but when you're learning you want to be sure you can do it yourself. fun fun fun!

[DingoBebe]

Easy mission. Why was everyone referring to the ascii table?

And, why use an ascii table and not a UTF-8 character encoding table? Is it because the first 128 characters of UTF-8 are the same as ascii anyway? So I guess the character values would be the same.

Question about ascii though:

Is the character map embedded into Windows software or online?

[Gatito]

Question about ascii though:

Is the character map embedded into Windows software or online?

Neither, ASCII is integrated to computers themselves. That's why when you start your computer or enter BIOS it doesn't show any Chinese or Russian, because the ASCII table includes only the English alphabet no matter where you buy your PC. There have been tries to come up with other character encoding by different states but because of compatibility ASCII remained the standard.

[fashizzlepop]

I'm almost positive ASCII is not built into the hardware itself. It comes from the software that runs on it (OS or BIOS code). The computer only understands 1s and 0s, not 32 for a space. However, all major programming languages are fully ASCII compatible (as far as i know).

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Gatito]

I'm almost positive ASCII is not built into the hardware itself

Yes, maybe I should be more careful with my wording. When I said integrated I didn't mean it in a hardware wise meaning, but more like a main component of a computer. Basically at the time where ASCII was standardized it was part of BIOS in most computers if not all. I was thinking BIOS = ROM = integrated.

The computer only understands 1s and 0s, not 32 for a space.

Well not 32 but it understands 00100000 as a space ( in ASCII ), remember ASCII is just an encoding scheme. When the processor called some kind of print command it would tie a bit pattern ( the ASCII character ) to some pixel combination at the terminal or control characters to do stuff like newline ( no real graphic card at that time so it was the processor's job).

Also note that this is about real old computers. Nowadays ASCII and other character encodings are probably handled more with software as you have different fonts, size, colors, spacing etc.

My guess is that any commercial or academic high/middle level language after the '80s (even earlier maybe) were ASCII compatible as seeing ASCII being the de facto encoding scheme in USA and probably the internet helped it spread worldwide.

[DingoBebe]

so is the way ascii works part of every electronical encryption since all systems' software is built on ascii?

I'm just trying figure out how one would determine to use ascii for this mission? As a person, I know that the letter 'd' is two character values from the letter 'a'. But what determines the values for the system I am decoding? How do I know the values for 'a' is still 1 and 'd' is still 4?

I hope my question is coming across clear.

And thanks for the help!