Does this mean this site properly licensed these songs?
Not all their stuff sounds like that, but I've been a big fan since first discovering them via a sample included in the XMMS2 media player way back in the early 2000's.
Relevant link: Ahoy - Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
<https://4mat.bandcamp.com/album/modern-closure> came out in 2019 and is one of my favorite albums of all time, but I'm not sure that it fits all of the elements of "keygen music" which are hard to pin down.
Same guy is behind these both.
Also, DRM-free music and streaming for KEYGEN CHURCH on Bandcamp:
PS: Not to be confused with British mods. ;)
The first thing that it played to me was Crockett's Theme.
I spent the first few seconds looking at the description, which said something else, and saying to myself "No, that's definitely Crockett's Theme.".
I was amused that Crockett's Theme was the very first one played to me. Alas, I didn't note the sompletely unrelated title before closing the page, and have no clue now where it is in the collection.
I've always been in slight awe of these kind of teams/releases. Cracking (mostly) for the raw intellectual challenge and bundling it with demoscene-ish artistic expression - usually a unique UI and obviously a great chiptune. I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..
Speculating: there may be parallels between this and other fields with entirely unnecessary artistic expression. Think watchmaking where watch movements with superlative finishing are celebrated and often command premium pay (e.g watches with the Geneva Seal). Beyond a certain point, the finishing adds absolutely nothing to the watch aside from showcasing talent.
There's something to the idea that if someone spent a ton of effort building something, even if it's superfluous, it garners a level of trust in the end product.
>Speculating:
not the most elaborate things.
Because they share the same roots, the same general "scene". The demo groups and the crack groups always mingled. We were all "sceners". Tons of groups had a presence in both areas. Most of the graphic artists and musicians were mainly part of the demo scene but lent their talent here and there.
(Computer-wise I grew up in the C64 and the Amiga demo scenes during the early-to-late 90s.)
Pretty straigthforward. "The scene" originated in 6502 or 68000 or what have you assembly programmers in the '80s. If you program assembly, you crack software. If you program assembly, you make cool graphics tricks to show off your fast code. And, if you program a computer in the '80s, the sound card is basically just a synthesizer chip, waveforms and shit, thus, chiptunes.
They are composed on trackers and the mod files are more akin to a MIDI file than they are “waveforms and shit”. At least not if you talk about “waveforms” in the PCM sense of the term.
The evolution of these mod files is an interesting one. Epic were the ones who most leaned into this for commercial uses. Games like the original Unreal and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 had some awesome sounding music and was the same mod files.
As a much younger nerd and hobby hacker too, I always wondered how those keygens were so small in size yet sounded so modern. Took years before I learned about trackers. I was pretty late to the game on that one.
From there, a given tracker would have all kinds of shenanigans available for manipulating the audio, in addition to whatever one wanted to do in an external audio program with a full effects stack.
Once you noodle around with synthesizers a bit, everything looks like either an oscillator or a transform... and who cares what the oscillator is.
It was kind of like writing music in hexadecimal.
I wasn’t particularly good at it though. I much preferred the workflow of a sequencer to a tracker.
Sounds like you had a lot of fun in it though?
In parallel people were writing more and more elaborate demos to show off skills or just demonstrate what was possible, and the two naturally coalesced since the people overlapped.
For example, one of the earliest copy protection methods - and one that still underpins a lot of today's copy protection - was to include intentionally-bad sectors on the floppy disks that you shipped. That's not something you'd normally even consider - why would you ever want to have intentional errors? And it makes even less sense to the non-creative mind when you consider that you can't just "write an error" - that's not how the common abstractions for disks work, and hardware is normally built in such a way that it's difficult to intentionally introduce an error. You actively have to go out of your way to misuse the hardware capabilities available to you in order to do so.
However, that very same difficulty in "writing an error" is also what made it such an effective copy protection method! Any traditional disk copying program would consider an error to be proof that your disks were corrupted, and many wouldn't even continue past the point of the error because it could lead to disk thrashing. Meanwhile, because you had much more control over the hardware back then than you do today, the copy-protected program could actually use the floppy disk controller directly to put in its own tests for detecting an error in a particular spot, such as reading the same sector multiple times and seeing if it got different data, or perhaps even by measuring the flux directly, and only proceed with the program if the error is there as it expected it to be.
You can't do these things using the standard INT 21 calls that DOS gives you, or even through the BIOS. (Actually, for many years PCs were considered useless for demomaking compared to other platforms such as the Amiga.) Finding a solution like that takes a creative mind - and conversely, so does working out how to defeat it. You have to know what your hardware can and can't do, or you have to work it out through experimentation. And as it turns out, you had to have exactly these same skills if you wanted to be able, say, do 3D on a system that has no floating point processor, or to be able to draw 4096 colours simultaneously, or to be able to arbitrarily draw to the overscan area of the screen, or any of the other things you might be able to figure out and want to show to the world what your chosen platform can do. And thus, cracktros were born.
I'm joking. I don't use Windows.
Modland is over 20 years old at this point.
I personally use: https://modarchive.org which has a grand selection too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36597460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533362
...?
Also, I hope this site doesn't disappear if/when the rather unpredictable .tk TLD operator decides to do something dumb.
They have a large collection of tracker music and while it's not strictly keygen music it is still worth looking at.
https://keygenmusic.tk/#track=Reloaded/RELOADED%20-%20Seriou...
Nowadays you have a few large companies dominating everything.
There are no forums, there's reddit and discord.
The are no private websites, there's uniform Meta Twitter.
Google search sucks.
Everything is AI.
Toxicity is rampant.
Pirate sites, the few are full of racists and other assholes.
The communication on "social networks" is post, like, comment, like, next.
You may not speak your mind, including HN, you get censored and/or otherwise canceled.
And this whole thing bleeds into real life. People are edgy, dissatisfied, unfriendly, can't take criticism, even if it's constructive.
We now also have a web where ActiveX, the Windows-only IE browser engine, and Flash+Shockwave binaries are no longer exist as mainstream web technologies. As a Linux user, this is great!
> There are no forums, there's reddit and discord. > The are no private websites, there's uniform Meta Twitter.
Incorrect. I regularly read the VOGONS forum (https://www.vogons.org/) for retro computing related topics. Is the forum for you? Maybe, maybe not. There are plenty of others as well though many are specific to niches. Hacker News is also a kind of forum.
Focus on what you want to get out of a forum rather than a forum for the sake of a forum.
> Google search sucks.
Yeah, modern Google search really sucks. I often find ChatGPT or Claude better at fuzzy-finding than modern search engines. Depends on what I'm looking for.
> Everything is AI.
AI as a concept has existed in marketing for decades. The term has picked up again and todays LLM's will probably seem quite dumb in a decade. They're great fuzzy-finders though - I regularly use Claude for various dev tasks including DOS and embedded development.
> Toxicity is rampant.
I have a childhood memory, early 90's, where the news was on the TV talking about a bombing/attack/similar in the middle east. It's a fuzzy memory, but it continues having a strong impact on my life with regards to negativity in the world. Things have always sucked, will continue to suck, but likewise for the opposite. Focusing on what is in my control and positive has helped me a lot here.
> Pirate sites, the few are full of racists and other assholes.
I can't say I've ever spent enough time on pirate sites to bother with conversation. Plenty of these sites continue to exist and media is still aquireable. I'm amused anytime _someone I know_ finds a 10-year-plus old torrent that still has seeders.
Side note, there's even a modern, open-source keygen for older versions of Windows available on GitHub that has not been taken down (user Endermanch). It even has keygen music!
> You may not speak your mind, including HN, you get censored and/or otherwise canceled.
_Someone I know_ has been a life-long pirate and has always had this problem with regards to pirating things.
> And this whole thing bleeds into real life. People are edgy, dissatisfied, unfriendly, can't take criticism, even if it's constructive.
Some people suck, some don't. I was lightly bullied through my entire childhood so this was kind of the status-quo for me. However, my friends were an exception and they were and still are great! The only recent change I've noticed in my socialsphere is a change in family members for the worst. One side of my family went down the path of becoming pushy Grumpelstiltskin's, so I did have to make a choice to remove them from my life. The keyword for me was pushy, not necessiarily a difference of opinion. It was difficult to cut off contact, but doing so allowed me to spend mental energy on people who have positive impacts on my life.
The internet became less of a place for people like us as the rest of the world embraced it. This does extend beyond the web as even culture is more varied than ever (music, shows, memes, etc). It might take more work to find what fits you, but it's still out there.
> You may not speak your mind, including HN, you get censored and/or otherwise canceled.
This sounds contradicting to me. By the way, the internet was always toxic, way more than now. From my experience the toxicity is very toned down due to the censorship you mentioned. Now it's mostly snark.
> Pirate sites, the few are full of racists and other assholes.
So should we censor them or not? Choose what you are complaining about
This is what I most frequently see in flagged comments.
My favorites from this era:
- DataChild of SAE - Tune 1[1]
- Zoef of FAiRLiGHT - Tune 2[2]
They're from a CLASS installer of THPS2. Allegedly :)
stuckkeys•6mo ago