Also not entirely related (kinda?), but I also regularly listen to the music that was inside the Digital Insanity keygen for Sony Vegas. https://youtu.be/kJln_F7Y2P4
Nostalgia!
Maktone [1] did some very nice chiptunes for Razor [2] [3]. This playlist [4] has a lot of good Razor ones, I bet someone was looking for [5] =]
Also, a lot of keygens didn't have to be used back when a simple hexedit of one value could validate the software. I remember that being the case for mIRC. And Sublime Text. I mean, it could be as simple as changing an if statement to if not. I use the same idea for Proxmox. It is quick and dirty, but not the way the code was intended. If you wanna go that route, a keygen is the way (a serial does the job). With crack, you never know what it does, same goes for keygen (wrt malware). I still love Serials 2000. A program which had all the keys and serials in existence. Which was a big feat back in the end of '90s when search engines were shit. It even had regular updates/patches.
As for the website. Screenshots don't show videos.
[1] https://archive.org/details/all_20240526
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwO26qel2U
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI46EyzaKI8
[4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5CC3A42488052F20
That sounds useful! Back in the day reversing was fun, and I'd rather do it myself than risk downloading malware.
That said I'll never forget the name of astalavista.box.sk - which was sometimes used for reference, and +fravia for giving guidance to the beginners.
And instead of YT/archive (though, shoutout to textfiles.com, which is now part of archive), https://www.pouet.net/ and https://scene.org/ is still where things are generally at
It was a magical time mostly because computers were full of possibilities. Someone gave me a CD with Visual Basic 4 and I figured out programming just from reading the help files. I still have no idea how I managed to stumble my way through to actually making real programs.
I left my system administration position in the 2010s because it brought back none of anything remotely close to those vibes. Staring at a cloud admin panel in a website all day made me start to hate computers. It was then I realized it was always just going to be a hobby if I wanted to keep it the way I remembered. Fine by me
Get a cool tool from a magazine? yep just throw it on to production servers - no testing or letting people know what the hell they did (I got burnt a few times from people doing this!)
no change control, no documentation - just reverse the changes, if it doesn't work immediately - although some people never even made back ups of the previous files - crazy shit
We didn’t know what we know today and so every turn felt like a discovery.
More recently the definition of 'chiptune' shifted to specifically mean music from 8-bit sound chips.
What the hell do you think I’m talking about? I’m done arguing at a brick wall. You basically just validated what I said and yet continue to say I’m wrong. We embedded the music. We needed to play the music. Windows only supoorts PCM and MIDI at the time. Pick one.
Obviously the MOD libraries outputted PCM to WinMM. That's the job of the MOD library.
You're arguing with someone who was actually writing Windows (and DOS if it matters) applications in C/C++/asm the early nineties.
If you really wanted MIDI, the best option in the nineties would have been just to include the original MIDI data. You could of course also generate MIDI data as you go, but why bother?
Sure you can, both are sequenced music formats, and if you can control the set of samples used to play back the MIDI (which Windows provides APIs for!) you can get it to sound right.
You've gotten yourself into a silly argument here. You're correct that one obvious way to play back a tracker module would be to embed a library that synthesises PCM. But Windows does ship with a MIDI playback engine that allows loading custom sounds. There is nothing unreasonable about converting a tracker module into a combination of a MIDI sequence and a custom DLS bank and then using DirectMusic to play it back.
I see EXE names and I think cracks were distributed that way. I don’t have enough insight into the cracking scene to know if there was any underground open source back then.
These days, having the source to these graphic effects would be invaluable!
Nature of _the scene_ was such that one would do an effect and then another would wonder how it was done and try to better it, all without source. That's kind of why it's rare for you to find sources of such things.
Either to protect the authors of the original software to check if the warez group got the full algorithm or if they have something mildly different from the original that allows the authors to detect a keygen in newer versions, or because the warez group wants to make life more difficult for copycats... or, and I've seen my fair share of that (and earned good money to clean up), a third party wrapped a highly popular keygen like for Adobe CS6 in some sort of malware and wanted to avoid detection.
You can find a lot of groups/individuals publish a lot of esp. their older stuff now.
Two off the top of my head:
- https://github.com/ConspiracyHu (and they made a W32 port of Future Crew's Second Reality, which is public domain: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality)
- Farbrausch published their original demo tool source ages ago: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public
self_awareness•1mo ago
throwfaraway135•1mo ago
bob1029•1mo ago
This inspiration to build things that look like this is what has been lost.
self_awareness•1mo ago
anaisbetts•1mo ago
z500•1mo ago
breakingcups•1mo ago
self_awareness•1mo ago
It's not all about WinAPI, it's about the approach.
Today's approach is "let me use electron for GUI and python backend for my bitcoin monitoring app because it's convenient for me". This results in bundling 1 GB of code for a trivial project which is a pain to use.
And the "legacy" approach is "let me use masm32 and winapi because it will be enough".
yonisto•1mo ago
CyMonk•1mo ago
https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=datas
reactordev•1mo ago