So I tried to "cheat" the storage cracker level by doing a binary search. To facilitate that, I went back to my ALU design and added two bootleg functions, ROR (shift bits right) and ROL (shift bits left). That let me double or halve a number to increment my guess. The function worked great, and I could guess 128, followed by 192, then 224,240, etc. and if that was too high, I could make the guess lower by half that amount, like 236, etc. It's a classic way of doing the search in a minimum number of steps.

Problem was... Every guess I sent to the output was followed by a response from the input that said the value was too high. So the guesses went 128, 64,32,16,8,4,2,1,0.

Each guess was send reg5 to output, followed by input to reg3. in to reg3 always returned 1.