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GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene
- self_awareness 10mo agoA lot of those were written in assembly by teenagers, using WinAPI directly. Yet they still run on Win10/Win11. A lost art.
- throwfaraway135 10mo agoThematically, many of them resemble the kind of WordArt we used to make as children in MS Word.
- bob1029 10mo agoWin32 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.
- self_awareness 10mo agoIf 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- anaisbetts 10mo agoThe code generator just recreates the C header files in C#, let's not be dramatic.
- z500 10mo agoIs it a lost art or does nobody do it more than they have to because it was always such bear?
- breakingcups 10mo agoThose aren't mutually exclusive
- self_awareness 10mo agoDefinitely 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".
- yonisto 10mo agoDo you know where I can find source code for such intros?
- CyMonk 10mo agoe.g. on this very site. https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=datas https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=datas
- reactordev 10mo agoIt wasn’t all assembly (though those were the popular ones), heavy C use too. What really changed the game was when DirectX came.
- m00dy 10mo agoIf you’re familiar with these concepts, Deepwalker’s intro [0] is heavily inspired by the HOODLUM GTA5 demoscene :) [0]: https://deepwalker.xyz https://deepwalker.xyz
- mavamaarten 10mo agoI 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 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 https://youtu.be/kJln_F7Y2P4 Nostalgia!
- Fnoord 10mo ago> 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 https://archive.org/details/all_20240526 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwO26qel2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwO26qel2U [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI46EyzaKI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI46EyzaKI8 [4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5CC3A42488052F20 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5CC3A42488052F20 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K32PLx21Bi0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K32PLx21Bi0
- stevekemp 10mo ago> 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.
- panki27 10mo ago
- ryandrake 10mo agoWebsite 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.
- monerozcash 10mo agoRefreshing the page fixed that for me on Safari.
- ryandrake 10mo agoYea, 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?
- stavros 10mo agoOh 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.
- shoobiedoo 10mo agoIt 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
- stavros 10mo agoExactly, 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.
- 123pie123 10mo agoI 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
- reactordev 10mo agoWhat 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.
- vardump 10mo agoI 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.
- reactordev 10mo agoYou’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.
- vardump 10mo agoNo, 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.
- reactordev 10mo ago>”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.
- vintagedave 10mo agoFor 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!
- Keyframe 10mo agoThese 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.
- mschuster91 10mo agoA 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.
- burnt-resistor 10mo agoNothing 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.
- effekt 10mo agoAs 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 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 https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality) - Farbrausch published their original demo tool source ages ago: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public
- bitwize 10mo agoI'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.
- jitander 10mo agoJitu