It's not about Automata UK, but the film directed by Gabe Ibañez with Antonio Banderas.
In the film Banderas is the agent Vaucan who has a pager whose ring remembered me of something. You can listen to it at roughly minute 9:40~9:50. I cut the part, trying to silence the rest of the noise with Audacity.
https://cdn.freesound.org/previews/698/ ... 216-lq.ogg
I wonder if we can extract some data from this...
Automata (2014) - pager sound
Re: Automata (2014) - pager sound
Sounds like a sped-up header from a Spectrum tape file...
Re: Automata (2014) - pager sound
Maybe we can detect what "Program" is?
Re: Automata (2014) - pager sound
I've converted it to a .wav, but trying to load it as a tape in Fuse does nothing - the emulated Spectrum just sits there blinking its border colour like it's searching but not finding anything.
Over to someone with better skillz.
Over to someone with better skillz.
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leslie_wss
- Drutt
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Re: Automata (2014) - pager sound
Hi,
I recently sent this message to sinclair.hu, a Hungarian Sinclair forum and community. Let me copy the discovery here too.
Let me share with you a recent ZX Spectrum experience! A few days ago I watched the 2014 film Automata, starring Antonio Banderas. While watching the movie, I noticed that in certain parts there are sounds like some kind of Spectrum loader sound. You never forget that sound, do you?
. Well, the matter did not let me rest, so a few days ago I took the trouble/time to look into it a little more.
There are at least three such parts in the film where Spectrum sounds can be heard. For example, one of these is when the protagonists are recovering in the desert after a car rollover. So I saved a few seconds of sound from the film and then started editing with Audacity. I thought I would cut it a bit, clean it, filter the sound etc. and I'm going to try to load it on an emulator to see what the mysterious program could be whose loader sounds are heard in the movie. Unfortunately, this didn't work even after a few hours of trying, but I didn't give up so easily.
Then I read it again, rediscovered how the Spectrum stores and loads the data, how long the pulses are, what the 0 and 1 bit information is, etc.
Armed with this knowledge, I "simply" started mapping the waves in Audacity, marking each group of 8 bits
. Based on the waves/pulses, I started typing the bits I thought I recognized into a Hex editor.
The first two bytes were easy because they output 0x00 0x00. This is correct, the first 00 is the header flag byte, and the second indicates that it is a Program header (not a code block, for example).
The thing was on track, but from here it started to get really exciting, because after that comes the data of the file name. I wrote the bits and bytes nicely, and "&°·4" started to appear in the text view in the Hex editor. But that didn't seem like a good thing
. I suspected that something might have slipped while parsing the bits, so I shifted the whole thing by one bit, and finally a better looking file name came together.
And what do you think what was that?
Well, of course it's "ManicMiner"!
Do you believe that in a 2014 movie, they used nothing but the loading sound of the ManicMiner Spectrum program as some kind of data communication sound?! Madness!
It seems I didn't account for the SYNC pulse and that's why it was wrong with 1 bit on the first try. But I finally put all the data in the binary file and did the calculation to check the checksum if it's good. And it was.
If you look at the image of my little decryption (first image), you can see that the value and interpretation of the next 3 WORDs after the file name is as follows:
0x004E - Length of data block
0X000A - Autostart line number
0X004E - The start of the variable area relative to the start of the program
The Length of data block, i.e. 0x004E, is exactly 78 in decimal, which wonderfully matches the length of one of the Manic Miner programs found on WoS, shown in the picture (second picture, right side) sent by one of the forum members, Makranc. Even the autostart line number is correct, which is 10.
So I'd say that's what is hidden in the movie.
I spent quite a few hours on this thing, but I enjoyed the little investigation and I'm glad it ended up like this. I say it was worth it for me.
Let me attach a picture of the little work, and a pic from Makranc about the program in question on WoS.
I recently sent this message to sinclair.hu, a Hungarian Sinclair forum and community. Let me copy the discovery here too
.Let me share with you a recent ZX Spectrum experience! A few days ago I watched the 2014 film Automata, starring Antonio Banderas. While watching the movie, I noticed that in certain parts there are sounds like some kind of Spectrum loader sound. You never forget that sound, do you?
. Well, the matter did not let me rest, so a few days ago I took the trouble/time to look into it a little more.There are at least three such parts in the film where Spectrum sounds can be heard. For example, one of these is when the protagonists are recovering in the desert after a car rollover. So I saved a few seconds of sound from the film and then started editing with Audacity. I thought I would cut it a bit, clean it, filter the sound etc. and I'm going to try to load it on an emulator to see what the mysterious program could be whose loader sounds are heard in the movie. Unfortunately, this didn't work even after a few hours of trying, but I didn't give up so easily.
Then I read it again, rediscovered how the Spectrum stores and loads the data, how long the pulses are, what the 0 and 1 bit information is, etc.
Armed with this knowledge, I "simply" started mapping the waves in Audacity, marking each group of 8 bits
. Based on the waves/pulses, I started typing the bits I thought I recognized into a Hex editor.The first two bytes were easy because they output 0x00 0x00. This is correct, the first 00 is the header flag byte, and the second indicates that it is a Program header (not a code block, for example).
The thing was on track, but from here it started to get really exciting, because after that comes the data of the file name. I wrote the bits and bytes nicely, and "&°·4" started to appear in the text view in the Hex editor. But that didn't seem like a good thing
. I suspected that something might have slipped while parsing the bits, so I shifted the whole thing by one bit, and finally a better looking file name came together.And what do you think what was that?
Well, of course it's "ManicMiner"!
Do you believe that in a 2014 movie, they used nothing but the loading sound of the ManicMiner Spectrum program as some kind of data communication sound?! Madness!
It seems I didn't account for the SYNC pulse and that's why it was wrong with 1 bit on the first try. But I finally put all the data in the binary file and did the calculation to check the checksum if it's good
. And it was.If you look at the image of my little decryption (first image), you can see that the value and interpretation of the next 3 WORDs after the file name is as follows:
0x004E - Length of data block
0X000A - Autostart line number
0X004E - The start of the variable area relative to the start of the program
The Length of data block, i.e. 0x004E, is exactly 78 in decimal, which wonderfully matches the length of one of the Manic Miner programs found on WoS, shown in the picture (second picture, right side) sent by one of the forum members, Makranc
. Even the autostart line number is correct, which is 10.So I'd say that's what is hidden in the movie.
I spent quite a few hours on this thing, but I enjoyed the little investigation and I'm glad it ended up like this. I say it was worth it for me
.Let me attach a picture of the little work, and a pic from Makranc about the program in question on WoS.
Re: Automata (2014) - pager sound
One of the world's obscurest mysteries is finally solved!