Is anyone following the crazy goings on with the new Portal update?
The main action is in this thread (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php168990) which is now getting seriously long. There's a good summary here (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php173294&highlight=summary), but here's the quick version...
- Valve release an update for Portal, with the subject "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations". There's also a new achievement (http://steamcommunity.com/stats/Portal/achievements/) called "Transmission Received" with the description "..?".
- The radio in the relaxation chamber has a red light instead of a blue one, and the cameras have changed slightly.
- Carrying this radio into the room with the button turns the light green, and morse code is heard. You get an achievement update 1/26.
- Turns out there's now 26 radios hidden in each of the test chambers and in a couple of rooms in the ending. Carrying these radios to certain points plays sound files.
- Radios thrown into the exit fields play a wierd sound file which sounds like it says "Get out of here" at the end.
- People have also hacked the resources and pulled out the sound files (named Dinosaur#) manually.
- Two of the sounds are morse code, which when translated sounding like boot up procedures.
- One morse code sound is an MD5 hash for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
- One code is "LOL"
- The other sound files are actually encoded images (http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=902578).
- You can get a series of numbers from the images, which turns out to be another MD5 hash, this time of a phone number in the area where Valve was founded.
- On the phone number is a BBS, which when connected to with a username and password kicks out some ascii art (http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/9306/portalasciilarge2.png) and some other documents linked here (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/62575).
- The BBS originally gave a message that was something like "use the Backup account to relieve pressure, pressure level high". This has since gone through medium to low.
- People are speculating that there isn't anything more to find yet, and that they might need to wait until the 11th of March (couple of references to 3/11 - the BBS is GLaDOS version 3.11 for example) when Gabe Newell is receiving an award at GDC.
Radios locations and images here (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=13754100#post13754100).
Fun stuff ;D