Quite some time ago (in SGP time- everything is relative!) someone over in the Big Forum (who I will track down later) posted that the binary data found in one vidscreen display translated to "BARRETT".
I have updated our image gallery with the
source image as well as a
"decoding" image which illustrates how that binary data is decoded into ASCII text. For anyone familiar with binary data and/or ASCII this is a trivial process and needs no explanation; however, there are many who are understandably clueless how this is accomplished. It is for these latter folks that I hastily cobbled together the
explanatory image.
The process is very simple: group the 1s and 0s (the binary bits) into groups of 8 bits (from left to right). These form 8-bit bytes. In the case of the "Operation Terminated" image, there are 56 bits which group into 7 bytes.
The bytes are converted to decimal values through a base conversion. You don't really need to understand the math behind this in order to participate in the fun: many programs are available to handle this for you (Windows users can even use the "Calculator" program in scientific mode.) What you end up with is a bunch of numbers less than 256. In the case of this data, all of the values range between 65 and 126. That makes the numbers hot candidates for text translation using ASCII decoding, since printable ASCII characters fall within this same range.
Finally, the numbers can be converted to text using an ASCII conversion table (
here's one) or a software program which implements it. (I use Excel for quick and dirty conversion via the char() function.)
Why is knowing this important now that the data has already been decoded?
The answer is that the same process might be used to decode other binary data found in the game. For example, it is widely held that the dots in the Jotun banners are representative of binary data. If this is true, then once the dots have been correctly transcribed into binary then it stands to reason that this same decoding process might unlock a message. At the very least: since there is precedent in ODST for ASCII encoded text displayed in binary, that decoding method should probably be tried first.
