Lets not forget the garish anime graphics and loud chiptune music that was the look of any reliable keygen.
If you're into this stuff I recommend the artist "Master Boot Record". In particular, they have "Keygen Church" side-project thats epically awesome.
Go open your text editor (vim, right?) to do some coding/etc and listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJtVDEx2HSk. No matter what you do, ~20 minutes later it'll have been epic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LiTxEUxSHU
On recommendations I like Dubmood.
https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/album/crackscene-music-best-of-...
IE, how many keygens had this track?
https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/keygen-13-razor-1911-vers...
I particularly enjoy this cover:
https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/command-conqueror-3-keyge...
This is epically danceable, and simultaneously feels like a Mega Man or Sh'Mup track:
Other songs that should be familiar to those either into mod music, or into the 90s warez/keygen scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkw7l8IgM4g Captain / Image - Space debris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJXtR0SwZ54 Skaven / Future Crew - Razorback https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCl9xYSOVtM Purple Motion / Future Crew - Satellite One
Did you ever hear the updated version by the original artist, Markus Kaarlonen? It's on the Rochard OST and is awesome too.
The keygen/demoscene style songs are produced using MIDI tracker software and leverage the sound capabilities of PC sound cards of the era which have a distinct sound to consoles like the NES. They are tend to have a very different structure, often closer to whatever particular sub genre of electronic dance music happened to be popular that year. Ersatz final fantasy themes played with an emulated SNES sound different than a House track powered by Soundblaster.
Although it is true that trackers in the PC era grew out of the Amiga (MOD) scene where sample playback was standard, there were also trackers for the 8-bit home computers which were used to create actual chiptunes on SID or the AY-3-8910 and its derivatives.
In the context of demoscene, chiptune-influenced compositions were still extremely popular, because including full-length instrument samples cost far too much space to distribute inside an intro or cracktro. Songs were made up of tiny bursts of white noise and tightly looped single-cycle waveforms, and the bulk of tracker "effects" (pitch bends, arpeggios etc) came directly from the techniques used to coax more tonal variety from sound chips of the 8-bit era.
Tracker music used for intros might not literally be "chiptunes", but they definitely took a lot more influence from chip music than from popular music. For example, this is the track that was bundled with Scream Tracker 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3hpnmANSMw (64-Mania by Edge)
But when you get to PC's you didn't have one set in stone hardware FM synth as a standard. Your hardware varied and it was absolutely controlled via MIDI even if you lacked the hardware to interface with external MIDI devices.
Depending on the hardware you had at the time your soundcard gave you either FM Synthesis such as with the classic SoundBlasters, Adlib etc. A fixed sample library in the case of devices like the Sound Canvas. Or with the later more advanced soundcards you had wavetable synthesis starting with the AWE32 which opened you up to soundfonts.
If you had a Sound Canvas or similar "sound module" as they were called, there were many, you absolutely did have external MIDI capabilities because it was a requirement for the device to work. You had to have a MIDI interface card or box. I had a 4 port Roland card in the mid 90's. I don't remember the model but they stopped making drivers after Win98 for it.
Although there were sound cards that supported connecting external MIDI instruments, and there were sound cards that implemented the so-called General MIDI set of instrument sounds on the card itself, tracker software did not use any of this functionality. Trackers loaded samples into memory and mixed the audio in software. This is how Scream Tracker (for example) could output directly to the PC speaker and did not require any particular sound card.
Because everything was mixed in software, the complexity of a composition was limited by the CPU and memory of the computer itself. It didn't matter what sound card you had. On under-powered PCs, loading very large samples or going above 4 or 8 channels of polyphony was not a viable option. This meant that tracker musicians operated under similar restrictions to the chip musicians of the 8-bit era. In fact, quite a few tracker musicians got their start in the 8-bit era, which is why a lot of demoscene music sounds similar to it.
(Edit to add: in case it's not clear, later trackers did use hardware mixing and effects if they were available, but I'm trying to explain more about the culture of the scene and how it influenced the type of music that came out of it.)
I jumped from the 8-bit (3 channel) world straight to a 486sx, so getting 16 channels seemed incredible at the time. I soon found out that going above 8 was ill-advised :) The sample size was limited to 64k too, so even if you did bounce tracks together you might only be able to load a few seconds.
File size in general felt like a big deal back then. Going over 100k for the whole mod was considered pretty excessive. I think Fast Tracker 2 ushered in the era of larger samples. I suppose it coincided with modems getting faster too, so people were less reluctant to download songs that got up into the megabyte range.
The demoscene stuff always seemed especially clever to me, because they didn't have the benefit of dedicating the entire computer just to mixing and playback - they needed to display graphics too! I think you can often tell when composers came out of the demoscene by listening for stuff like "J37" arpeggios and the sort of breakdown like in 64-Mania where you play the same sequence in two channels with slightly different settings to create a phasing or chorus effect.
The original SoundBlaster, SB Pro & SB 16 could and did output PCM sound, and there were mod players & trackers written for them that enabled the creation of chiptune style music-- generally music with very small PCM samples to sound like the C-64 or Atari ST. These uses on PC had nothing to do with MIDI.
Nearly all scene trackers were basically sample sequencers, not MIDI (excluding rare exceptions such as OctaMED which could send midi events as well.)
Chiptune music in the tracker era often meant using a small synth style waveform as the sample so that the music sounded similar to earlier computers. Cracktros with small footprints often did this, example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBv1VHy0Igk
Early demoscene music was often influenced by Italo Disco and it’s offshoots, which were relatively obscure in the states thanks to the homophobic Disco Sucks movement.
‘Chiptune’ in the early console sense gained popularity a bit later, around the time of the VGmix/OCRemix communities. (As well as the LSDJ NullSleep phase where people danced to Gameboy producers.)
[0]: http://mbrserver.com
[1]: https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HSpWQH4iRs&list=PL7doxo2n1V...
IA! IA! BULLUG GEGBUG IBGABIUG GIXCURE DAGABCIEA FUIC!
Now it's 300mb for ~5500 songs, which is still impressive. I actually downloaded out of curiosity and seems like there's now a few mp3s and XMs in there which are bigger than simple midi files.