A new puzzle...

[buckysrevenge]

Someone got the hacked cartridge of LoZ from Brandon, it came with something along with it:

[Sirithang]

I wasn't sure where to post that, so thanks to have reposted my tweet !

Now didn't had a lot of time to dedicate to it but here is my first thought :

You can see that things are divided into square, and each square with either \ or /, with sometime a dot at one intersection.

I think things may be a binary encoding of some sort (two state possible per square \ or /) with dot marking separation maybe? (but unlikely, they just seem to be in between lozenge, so maybe only "cosmetic" to throw us off...)

Or I may be totally off, maybe it's something obvious I'm missing. Any theory is welcome =D

[SmashManiac]

Sweet! Thanks Brandon for the new puzzle and Sirithang for sharing it!

It's definitively two 9x9 binary matrices, with the orientation of diagonals representing the value. The dots are just representing the intersections of the invisible grid that was used to draw the diagonals.

I took the time to paint the squares in both matrices. See the picture attached to this post. The left matrix is the one on the front of the cartridge, while the right matrix is from its back. Note that it's possible that the colors of one of the matrix is inverted, since there is no guarantee that the orientation of the matrices match the orientation of the cartridge.

Since the proper orientation is unknown for each matrix, I was hoping that I would recognize some kind of 2D barcode symbology, but I didn't. The thought of XORing both matrices came to mind since there is about the same amount of squares of both types in each matrix, but again I have no idea what the proper orientation should be, and quick attempts didn't yield anything interesting.

[Sirithang]

Looked quickly, and seems data matrix can be 9x9

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Data_Matrix

And here are the two redone as 9x9 pixel black&white;

[SmashManiac]

Pretty sure it's not a data matrix - the edges don't match the symbology. It's also too small to be an Aztec Code, an EZcode or a QR code, and it's too big to be a mCode.

After some deeper research, I found a symbology that resembles the diagonal shapes of the design called DataGlyph, but it's patented by Xerox so I'm having trouble finding information about it except for this paper. If that's it however, then the slashes are 1s and the backslashes are 0s, which matches Sirithang's bitmaps assuming the orientation is correct. I'm having a hard time believing that a proprietary format was used for this puzzle though.

I'm attaching the 4 XOR possibilities just in case anyone sees something in them. Note that the colors may be inverted and that the orientation may be wrong. This post contains the normal XOR without any rotations compared to the original pictures.

[SmashManiac]

This post contains the 3 other XOR possibilities after rotating one of the layers.

Double-posting because the maximum number of attachments in a post is 3.

[SmashManiac]

I just had a new idea today: Since one of the codes is on the front of the cartridge and the other on the back, maybe you need to flip the back one before merging the images, and most likely horizontally to match the text orientation of the original labels.

Well, I didn't find any interesting results, but I didn't test all permutations either (rotations, flips, reversing colors, AND vs OR vs XOR, order of operations), so that's still something to explore.

Here's a picture where I attempted an XOR after an horizontal flop of the back code.