Flashbacks to the 90s and y2k. The internet was a better place back then and not just because of nostalgic reasons.
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.
> Toxicity is rampant.
> 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
> Nowadays you have a few large companies dominating everything.
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.
What exactly do you mean by speaking your mind? Like, "I'm just saying" about gay or black people, something like that?
This is what I most frequently see in flagged comments.
[flagged]
The fact you didn't that is depressing in itself.
I've been looking for that Paradox Photoshop CS2 one for years. Great nostalgic memories.
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..
>I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..
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.)
alt.binaries.goodtimes
> 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:
> I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..
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.
That’s not how these mods are created though.
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.
The tracker space is weird and full of twisty passages... Sampling was a common starting point for the basic sounds. The cool thing about tracker files is that they would include all the pcm samples, so people would build up their library of sounds largely by getting them from other people's files... A few would create their own samples by recording things out in meatspace, or do delightfully weird stuff like drawing waveforms.
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.
Interesting reading that because the trackers I used didn’t support sampling. If I recall correctly, they were just tone generators. So you had to define waveforms like you might for a VSTi in a modern (by comparison) sequencer. Albeit without the fancy UI of a VSTi, any piano roles, nor the drag-and-drop placement of bars of music.
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.
Oh yeah - the tracker itself wasn't the sampler, but one would often import sampled waveforms (or borrrrrow 'em from other tracks). I seem to remember fasttracker ][ (which i spent a ridiculous amount of time with as a teenager) had some 'draw a waveform' functionality which is possibly the worst sound interface imaginable.
Hahaha I hadn’t used fasttracker ][.
Sounds like you had a lot of fun in it though?
Sound can be synthesised out of few basic waveforms. It’s the most common approach.
Yes, I know how sound can be synthesised. That’s not the point I was making though. The point is those mod files are generated from trackers rather than programming any SFX chips directly.
I used to hang in those IRC channels. Some of the "crews" mentioned spending more time on creating graphics, mixing new sound rather than cracking/reverse engineering the software itself.
haha mind you a lot of (not all tho!) cracks back in the day was a few nops , changing a je into jne, etc.
not the most elaborate things.
I think a good part of it is the tooling and how it looks a bit like reverse engineering. Ever play with a tracker? It's like editing MIDI triggers with a hex editor. Here's aphex twin making music in one
In terms of cracked releases started with simple text and screens to let people know who had done it, and escalated from there.
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.
that paradox bop is truly one of my favorites. back in the day i would just leave the keygen running for the tunes. what other software can people say they leave on just for the vibes ?? good times
Windows XP installer, lol
The thing that ties cracking to the demoscene is that, as Trixter/Hornet states in the excellent documentary "Demographics: Behind the Scene"[0], copy protection itself is a creative process; you need to think about how the hardware works.
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.
You also may find this interesting: https://pixeltune.org
They have a large collection of tracker music and while it's not strictly keygen music it is still worth looking at.
Wild they still have a .tk domain, I paid for one and when renewal came up it was not possible to renew due to the Meta lawsuit. Wonder how much time they have left....
Wow, very nice! Interestingly, uses a completely different set of player libraries compared to https://chiptune.app (chiptune2.js and libopenmpt vs. libgme and libxmp, etc.) Also was started way back in 2015. And yet there are many similarities.
Ah, memories from when the internet was still good. Anyone know of any good writing about that time on the internet? IRC, FTP, USENET etc? There was a miniseries called "The Scene" which captured some of it. Some of it is just childhood memories, but I'm also convinced it was a special time that won't be coming back.
Really nice, only thing missing is, the site load starting a random tune at like 300% volume late at night, for the full experience
Great memories. "Keygen music" feels like a genre of electronic music... Are there people making electronic music that sounds like Keygen music but with modern instruments?
Tracker music? Pretty sure communities that develop those tools and use them to create music still exist.
Relevant link: Ahoy - Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
Check out [MASTER BOOT RECORD](https://www.youtube.com/@MasterBootRecord) and [KEYGEN CHURCH](https://www.youtube.com/@KEYGEN_CHURCH).
Same guy is behind these both.
Official website with links to Bandcamp, live streams, IRC, tour schedule, etc.
Also, DRM-free music and streaming for KEYGEN CHURCH on Bandcamp:
They performed live at Revision demoparty this year! Here's my recording of the ending to their incredible set: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D_60udyrK-I
Saw them live. Fantastic gig
Well, there's still people making still making chiptunes, and there's still interest in developing tracker technology both for chiptunes (i.e. OpenMPT) and for music composition in general (Renoise DAW).
<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.
mind.in.a.box's album "R.E.T.R.O." (2010) has a few songs that sound keygen-esque (aka chiptune).
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.
It's a whole YouTube genre. Witness this chiptune version of Howard Carter's Stand-up Maths Theme:
While not strictly on-topic, this is another great re-arrangement of the Stand-up Maths Theme.
Check out artists like Fearofdark, Zabutom, and labels like Bandcamp's "Future Funk" scene or Data Airlines for modern takes on the keygen/chiptune aesthetic.
Extension of the modtracker demoscene. I remember one of my friends from high school later won an international music contest and was included in some ftp mod collection.
PS: Not to be confused with British mods. ;)
The Glitch Mob?
An album of keygen music covers and remixes: https://sgfr.highquality.rip/sgfr-0009/index.html
This music was always great, but always played so loudly.
I felt the same way, but admittedly the scenario in which I would encounter it was always “in a dark, quiet room at 3am after downloading something and forgetting once again that the .exe is probably going to play music”
Seems to be missing one of my most nostalgic from Sony Vegas 9 cracks:
„This is EPIC“ - King Harkinian
The music might be over a decade old but it still plays. I heard it in Infinitode 2 released in 2021.
Unreal Superhero 3! I'm also fond of the ORiON Nero tracks for some reason. Also dubmood.
That's exactly the one I searched first!
as covered in this YouTube video : "The Soundtrack of Online Piracy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgcrdv8zpM)
This made me remember my favorite cracktro from INC. Something about this song captures how I felt about the whole "warez" scene when I was a kid... cool, mysterious - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9-5bQ4mSQI
I totally get what you mean, this one is what conveyed that same feeling for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yyjeTZn2K8
This one lives rent free in my head: https://keygenmusic.tk/#track=ORiON/ORiON%20-%20Nero%206.3.0...
Something to evict it:
https://keygenmusic.tk/#track=Reloaded/RELOADED%20-%20Seriou...
Great collection!
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 :)
"I've opened that site and the activate windows watermark on my desktop vanished."
I'm joking. I don't use Windows.
I just wish it has a loop option. I absolutely love the design and varieties of the music.
Seriously!!! One of the biggest points of keygen is they loop indefinitely. Dont play them like songs. Get in the trance.
I always considered this the real deal and authorative collection of chip tunes: https://ftp.modland.com/
Modland is over 20 years old at this point.
Oh nice. I'll check this when I get home.
I personally use: https://modarchive.org which has a grand selection too.
Someone should gather up, curate, organize, and release a giant collection of keygens containing music as a torrent. (I doubt IA or elsewhere would host it for very long.)
Given intros (where these keygen chiptunes originate from) were the precursor for, and are also considered by many to be part thereof, the demoscene, are we to assume this is also a UNESCO cultural heritage as per these news headlines...
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
...?
Related, there is a awesome online radio (it was born 2006) game music: https://rainwave.cc
in a similar vein, there's also Nectarine Radio for demoscene music: https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/
A more proper name for this music is chiptunes. Unless it was produced for an actual key generator.
Impressive collection, the although website is slamming my poor T8100 powered thinkpad to 100% at times listening to the collection.
Didn't really understand what keygen music meant until I did a Google, clicked, outstanding archiving
Ha! Memories from 25 years ago when you had to run Windoze for your audio and sometimes chess software.
More than 25 years.
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.".
Haha, nice. I searched and there’s one keygen that also played Crockett’s Theme, but at least it credited it. Then another one I shuffled to was the theme from Airwolf.
These are pretty much staples for any synthesizer music collection that ever was. There's going to be an Axel F in there somewhere, too. And possibly Chariots of Fire.
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.
What MOD producers at my high school used in the mid 90's:
>There is no illegal content. Just music from keygens
Does this mean this site properly licensed these songs?
Yes, I believe it does. No lawyer knows who the hell these underground artists are or if it is even possible to sue them. The first step in any lawsuit is have someone to take from.
It's actually the artists who can sue since it's their work being distributed. The distributor might have a fair use argument since the purpose is artistic preservation and the artists clearly never intended to profit off the songs. If a trendy DJ remixed one and it saw commercial success, the original artist might have a case.
The fair use exception for preservation doesn't give them the master or mechanical rights needed to stream them to other people.
The fact that their music was originally distributed uncontrollably and for free within keygens and cracks probably means that the artists don't care about sites like this.
I forgot about this site! Keygen music is one of our unsung cultural treasures imo
So cool! I used to collect the ones i came across too, they are always awesome
Kind of ironic there is no download button!
The S3M modules which came with the BB demo from AAlib were magical.
Aalib <3. Last year, I wrote a diff to fix the fire aalib console demo to work on modern fast machines.
BB needs a fix too; it hangs when the audio begins to play. It might be an issue on threads.
If you like this kinda music, check out 4champ and modizer on iOS.
YESSS <3 699 :D happy to see Air on there haha
2621 is sa remix of Bubble Bobble II gameplay music.
SharpPlus Sqlite Developer v3.2.8.354 goes hard.
I apologize for shortness but <3
That is awesome.
Aryx.s3m 21 kiB of magic.
try Estrayk - Her Collection
This is amazing. Thank you so much to the authors for putting the time into this and sharing it. I would love a way to download a local archive of music like this.
Also, I hope this site doesn't disappear if/when the rather unpredictable .tk TLD operator decides to do something dumb.
Nostalgic xD
mr spock's cryo-bed <3
brought back lots of nice memories
Really cool!