GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene | Hacker News Reader

GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

gdimayhem.temari.fr

162 pointstodsacerdoti46 comments

Oh man, the nostalgia of buying magazines that came with shareware CDs (we didn't have the internet back then where I lived) and going to a net cafe for half an hour to download cracks, because we obviously didn't have any way to either procure or send USD half way around the world...

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.

It really was magical. It felt like the wild west. I used to buy a copy of 2600 and sit in a cafe reading it just feeling like I could do anything or go anywhere, which I guess I could to a degree back in those days.

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

Exactly, it really did feel like the wild west, and in the best way. All the sites were quirky and personal, not a company in sight. It really felt amazing to discover someone's little personalized corner on every single site.

I moved away from SysAdmin around 2010 and I worked with a fair amount of other techies and it really was the wild west in the stuff various people did with: sizeable production systems, Firewall rules (or lack of) network connectivity/ switches, and code changes

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

Most satisfying is to leverage computers as part of another job like engineering or management or whatever, where you are able to get creative and hack something together under your own control. Then you can use them as you please and they are strictly positive. Actual IT specialists get all the non fun jobs that are deep inside the machine.

Funny to think how useful help files and manuals used to be! I learned QBasic mostly from the builtin help system, VBasic mostly from clicking around, and even DirectX from the help files and tutorials. Nowadays documentation is outsourced to the community it seems, for the most part.

Yeah, VB4 had tutorials on how to make simple apps, and that's how I learned to program! I can't believe I learned about loops and variables and control flow structures by just reading the documentation.

I absolutely adored the little intro that Razor1911 added to their crack of GTA IV. Cool graphics, nice jingle, short, to the point. https://youtu.be/htbDeD-wv7s

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!

> 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

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K32PLx21Bi0

> A program which had all the keys and serials in existence.

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.

I have exactly the same Sony Vegas keygen experience as the parent poster, but with the song from your fifth link!

Maktone is so good! I remember hearing one of their songs in a GBA intro[1] and it still gets stuck in my head sometimes...

[1]: https://youtu.be/CGaqlSIUSEo

He's still alive and well! While he's not super active and let his website(s) die, you can follow him on Facebook where he generally seems the most active these days: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063887643279&ref=...

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

Funny enough, that Digital Insanity tune was just an embedded .mp3, which was considered very low-key for the time—it greatly enlarged the .exe size compared to the chiptunes.

What made these fun to make was the fact that some really smart people put a lot of time and effort into making a library that will allow you to play midi, “skin” windows HWND surfaces, co-routines, and a high level abstraction over win32 functions. Man, those were the days. These could be cranked out in a matter of hours for any new software as much of the market used the same few vendors or algorithms very similar.

We didn’t know what we know today and so every turn felt like a discovery.

I think most played Protracker, XM, S3M, IT, etc. modules, not MIDI. They typically used very short samples, a style which was called a 'chiptune', songs that were made sound like they came from some eighties microcomputer.

More recently the definition of 'chiptune' shifted to specifically mean music from 8-bit sound chips.

You’re talking about the songs. I know what a chiptune is, I’m talking about what sits between those. Protracker was how you made them. When embedding into apps, you had to play them. MOD files had to be converted into something. Lookup pocketmod. Some used PCM, some used midi. Windows had a wonderful midi api and synth back then. That’s what I used.

No, the MOD file(s) (embedded in the .exe) were just played as is. There were a lot of MOD player libraries even back then and the CPU load was negligible. The players weighed less than 10 kilobytes.

>”There were a lot of MOD player libraries”

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.

You can't render MOD songs to MIDI. Not even with modern AI.

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?

Good talk

> You can't render MOD songs to MIDI.

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.

Oh, so some people actually used DirectMusic's support for DLS? Cool!

GS Synth baby!! Back when ActiveX was cool and everything was exposed through COM.

A lot of those were written in assembly by teenagers, using WinAPI directly. Yet they still run on Win10/Win11. A lost art.

Thematically, many of them resemble the kind of WordArt we used to make as children in MS Word.

Win32 is definitely not a lost art. It's more accessible than ever with modern code generation tools like cswin32.

This inspiration to build things that look like this is what has been lost.

If today's programmers need code generation tools to use what teenagers could use on their own back in the day, then it truly is a lost art.

The code generator just recreates the C header files in C#, let's not be dramatic.

Is it a lost art or does nobody do it more than they have to because it was always such bear?

Those aren't mutually exclusive

Definitely a lost art.

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".

Do you know where I can find source code for such intros?

e.g. on this very site.

https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=datas

It wasn’t all assembly (though those were the popular ones), heavy C use too. What really changed the game was when DirectX came.

I've built games with raw X draw calls, including sprite-based games with XCopyArea and more recently, simulated vector displays with XDrawLine. The fact that there were/are kids doing this kind of thing with Win32 GDI calls tickles some deep aesthetic sweet spot in me.

For all those effects: is their source available?

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!

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.

A ton of these things is handwritten assembly. "All" you need to do is run it through a disassembler and you got the source... the key problem more is that virtually all cracks and keygens come heavily packed.

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.

Nothing a debugger can't fix. UPX and PKlite packing made keygens and cracks look more sus than they were. It source had been available, that would make them appear even less sus. There were a few drama incidents with Razor where a cracker provided source because of accusations.

As for cracktros, probably not. I should spelunk through backups. However, the most technical and competitive people generally transitioned to the demoscene in the early 2000s and that scene is far more open.

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

Jitu

If you’re familiar with these concepts, Deepwalker’s intro [0] is heavily inspired by the HOODLUM GTA5 demoscene :)

[0]: https://deepwalker.xyz

Website pretty much unusable on Mac/Safari: The viewport is so wide my browser shows about 1/4 of the horizontal content requiring constant horizontal scrolling. Firefox is better, but still requires horizontal scrolling to see the whole page.

Refreshing the page fixed that for me on Safari.

Yea, I tried that, and it does fix it initially, but as you scroll through the content, the site decides to resize its canvas all by itself, to the point where you have a giant horizontal canvas again soon. Why do web developers have to do this stuff?

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