Cipher from a video game

Question

First, let me clear something up. I am in a community of people who are trying to solve these few remaining ciphers in a video game series. Now don't get me wrong, the people behind making these ciphers are no joke seeing as it's taken 2 years to decode an Ubchi cipher, and 5 years (and counting) at the time of this post to try and crack an ADFGX cipher.

For this more recent cipher, I have tried hex for the first few numbers, and unless it's trying to show me a text image like a massive emoticon, I have to assume it uses another method to decode. I only know caesar and binary by heart but that's about it. Anyone who can help me figure out what type of cipher this is, it would really help out.

These are the first few numbers in the cipher page:

38 63 39 37 38 65 35 65 33 65 37 64 33 35 34 35 33 64 37 65 66 65 36 65 35 34 32 63 33 65 35 34 33 36 63 31 37 61

Of course, the cipher could continue to the next page and break to the next line going back to the first and repeating this pattern.

(Full image)

Answer 1

Your idea ...

... to treat the numbers as hex is correct. If you look at the image, you'll see that the last two numbers are 0d and 0a. These are the ASCII codes for carriage return and newline.

All other numbers are either in the range 30–39 or in the range 61–66. These are the ASCII codes for the decimal digits 0 to 9 and for the small letters a to f. In other words, the message decodes to a stream of hexadecimal numbers, probably a stream of bytes.

The bytes decoded from the first two lines of the text are:

8c 97 8e 5e 3e 7d 35 45 3d 7e fe
6e 54 2c 3e 54 36 c1 72 5c 7a c1
6b a7 e2 2f f9 8e 12 66 34 d0 1c

Of course, ...

... this is only a first step. As far as I can see from the first bytes, the new set of numbers is more or less evenly distributed across a wider range. A more thorough analysis would propably entail a transcription of all numbers to text, so that it can be tackled with a script or program.

We are probably looking for a text. There are 70 lines with about 33 half-bytes in each line, so the text could be about 1,000 characters long. The data could be a (text) bitmap, but I doubt that it is a bitmap image, i.e. that thze bytes written out as binary file would yield a readable format.