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.
> 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
https://vimeo.com/223378825
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.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Demographics_BehindtheScene