Well, I did it, I cracked Huevo and Vika. How did I do it, you ask?
I cheated.
A thread on hacking over in the Uru forums introduced me to the use of a RAM editor. I've used a hex editor -- indeed, diving into realMyst savegames required one -- but I had never thought to sift through memory while realMyst was running. So I got one, loaded up realMyst, entered the Rime Age (pretty sure I didn't have to do that, but I thought it couldn't hurt), and switched into the RAM editor.
Yech - not a pretty sight. But doing the obvious - search for huevo - brought up some interesting hits. Pretty quickly, I ran into memory locations that had readable phrases (that is, English) that looked promising. A pattern soon emerged: huevoXX, followed by a set of five CXShapeX and five CrystalXXColorX. I picked one of them, wrote down the Xs, and went back into realMyst. I got to the crystal imager, entered the shapes and colors, and got the following:
Well, that's not exactly what I got, as that screenshot was taken after I turned the static off. But there, in the imager, with the crystal combination you see, was an image from huevo. I wrote down all the rest of the huevo combinations. vika had only one, but its structure was similar to the cyanegg memory references, so I guessed that waving your way through the first crystal's colors might do the trick, and I was right.
Of course, these pictures have been viewable for quite some time. Aloys was a pioneer in extracting images from the files, and he describes his effort here. frob produced the first complete (or almost complete) set, which can be viewed at this site.
To tell the truth, the images you get by entering the right combination are not terribly good, but they're honest! Still, I have produced a series of images using a somewhat different approach, one that has also been widely used for a long time (I'm not sure who first used this approach). Below are links to each image and one to the whole set (recommended only for the patient or those with boradband). I've also included some notes on producing the images here along with some theories (wild guesses, really) about what the images might be here (NOTE: Now that Uru is out, I need to revisit that page).
As it turns out, we've always counted one too many images, as there is one less reference in memory than there are frames in the huevo.avi and vika.avi files. I'm pretty sure that the first frame is a key of some sort. Also, the 4th and 5th vika images are identical but there are two separate references. I wonder if the Easter bunny put the wrong frame in -- which means there's another vika picture floating around somewhere . . .
Below, I present the huevo and vika images with their crystal combinations - clicking on the image will take you to a larger version. Below crystal is the correct shape and color in case the image isn't clear enough. The order of the shapes and colors is with respect to the order you get when you wave through them, beginning with the short crystal shape and red color.
