next time, you may only use a real MSX. a 3GHz pentium and some internet sites make it too easy while all information was available in your MSX :-)

Nyyrikki: I read your post too late, the puzzle was already solved, but please post more msx related puzzles!

NYYRIKKI, sorry, I didn't have time to find an assembler to assemble your program... I just tried all of them by hand and I found also no other working candidates. (I type fast!

And indeed: I didn't use any MSX knowledge for this...

Maybe if you would have asked a long hidden word (say: 'produce') and said that it worked with the password 'brain', it would take lots of more time to use this brute force approach. Or an even longer one, of course

Quote:

Maybe if you would have asked a long hidden word (say: 'produce') and said that it worked with the password 'brain', it would take lots of more time to use this brute force approach. Or an even longer one, of course

I wanted to keep it so simple, that you can solve it in somehow reasonable time on MSX and even, when you don't have the optimal solution method. Ofcource you need to think a bit more if you want to be faster than others, when you don't have all that CPU power. You for example used 5 loops, but 4 is enough if you calculate the last letter. Trying all the possible combinations is not anyway sensible approach CPU-wise.

Since you had a dictionary file available, you can just look at every word in it and compute the checksum. That would also work for longer words.

mth and NYYRIKKI, yes, I could have done that too. I just reported what I did. I never even remotely tried to optimize it

manuel: I just wanted to point out that a longer word would not help against a different brute force approach.

Ah, true.

Note that the dictionary was not guaranteed complete (only about 100k words) I was lucky that 'brain' is not a very uncommon word and as such was in the dict.

Say Nyyrikki, how about a new puzzle of yours?

Here's a puzzle for ya... Howcome that ebay thingy on the right of my screen is currently burning in my retinas atm?

Yeah, is this some ebay related thing or did you guys remove this perfect harmony for some reason?

eBay is having some problemz, I guess they will solve it soon.

puzzle solved!

Time for the next puzzle then

Why don't you come up with one?

Hmm... It isn't easy to come up with something like this. How about this one:

Make a program, that prints "Hello" when it is loaded from BASIC like this:
BLOAD"HELLO.BIN"

Sounds like easy, but it isn't... Don't break the BASIC.