Welcome to the RC5 Team 3DNow!

The RC5-64 effort is a distributed computing project aiming at cracking the RC5-64 encryption scheme to push the quality of end-user encryption protection higher and gather more experience in the creation of other distributed computing projects which at some time may make most supercomputers obsolete.

The RC5 effort "Project Bovine" is meeting a challenge from RSA to break their encryption and is perfectly legal. In fact the person who manages to find the correct key is going to receive $1000 and another $1000 go to their team.

Why you should be on the team

Admitted, RC5 does not use 3DNow!, but it is a good thing for a community like ours to work on something as a team, with some internal competition spicing up things, some good natured bragging and a daily hangout date to attend.

Additionally, if we can get enough people on the team, it will be something to point at when talking to developers to say "Look how many 3DNow! users there are and how well they support our initiative". That alone would warrant that you get on the boat, it is almost as good as joining our campaign petition.

How to get started

To get started, download the client for your platform.

You'll either want the Win32-x86-gui (easier to configure) or linux or beos clients, depending on what OS you run. Install it and go through the configuration under the File menu:

Here you simply enter your email address, this will serve as your account information. Make it a valid one, please.

Here you set your mode of connection. I recommend the Lurk-Only so it won't go and dial while you are not around, especially in Europe that can get expensive! That way it won't run fully automated, but you can set the buffers big so you only have to update them every couple days. If you are on a LAN anyway, make it online always.

Unless you have problems or want to use a specific keyserver or you have to make proxy settings, leave this one alone.

Here you enter the buffer sizes. The optimum buffer size you can find out by running the "long" benchmarks from the File menu, usually the default settings should be good, I doubled them for my machines so they would keep fed all night, though.

This is for CPU detection and should work fine without your interference. If you have problems, say so on the forum instead of screwing this up first.

I recommend to set this option like this, the client will only use your idle cycles (don't mix with a software CPU cooling thing, that can cause hangups) and you won't feel that it is there unless you play a CPU-heavy game. If you do manual updates on the buffers don't hide it, otherwise do as you please.

What then?

Run the client, after about 24 hours you can access your personal statistics from the Help/Online menu on the client, it will take you to a web page that lists your accomplishments. At the bottom of the page you'll find a link saying

"I cannot remember my password. Please email armin@www.3dnow.org's password."

Well, whatever email address you entered upon configuration, not mine. Click on that and it will email you your password, which you'll need to edit your account information and to join any teams.

Once you have it, you want to join our team, the RC5 Team 3DNow!. To do that, visit the team's stats page and scroll to the bottom where it say "I want to join this team" join the team using your password (if you told the site to remember your password it will figure it out automatically).

Done! After the next stats run you'll be listed on the team.

Now keep the thing going and well fed and you'll like it more than a Tamagotchi!