In case you haven't heard of it, there's a silly little Windows game called Chip's Challenge. I played it quite a bit several years ago, and then I got bored and hacked its data file to get passwords for levels I couldn't reach by playing the game fairly.

If you want it, here it is: the game, the hack program, the whole works: chipstuf.zip (504 kb).

All right, I admit it.

I had way too much time on my hands, and I played a lot of Chip's Challenge. Then I got frustrated, as hackers often do, and I hacked the game. I dumped the data file out in hex, then pored over it until patterns revealed themselves... then, I wrote a program to dump out the passwords for all the levels.

The encryption scheme was simple, and here are the results!